Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I don't believe in censorship, I let my kids read omniverously, but I'm grateful I picked up this series and checked it out. We'll be having some long conversations this weekend about the culture we live in and that produces books like this. At first I thought these books would be a critique of Reality Television, of a corrupt and decadent society where some toil ceacelessly, and others amuse themselves endlessly like late-empire Romans. I hoped as I turned the pages that Suzanne Collins might have something real and important to say about how knowing that we are constantly being filmed changes the way we behave, even when we are in mortal peril. I hoped she'd have something to say about courage and love and the meaning of life and death. Forget about it. Where J.K. Rowling is an alchemist, collecting dross and ore from everwhere, and turning it into gold, Collins is a petty thief, stealing hamfistedly from Battle Royale, Survivor episodes and Project Runway. This series has the feel of something concocted by an editor a writer and a marketing director. Be sure to put in a bridal gown...the girls love bridal gowns! What upsets me the most is that she herself is a manipulative Gamekeeper who can make anything awful happen at will to her characters to move along her plot and she invites her readers to be like the audience who watches the Hunger Games, turning the pages to find out who will be slaughtered next and in what exciting way. Did she have any sense of irony or humor or satire (as Battle Royale does) that asked kids to question their experience, I'd forgive her everything, but she doesn't. It's all delivered very seriously. We are allowed to mourn for the very young and the very old but as to those trained for the gladitorial combats they are brute killing machines and we are allowed to cheer their demise. When Katniss kills...it's always in self-defense and she's killing someone who clealy deserves to die...she never is tortured by her own lack of morality. How convenient... I am reminded of the zen story: You are having a dream that you are on a lifeboat with your mother and your father. You are told that the situation is such that you can only save one of them. Which would you choose? In the Hunger Games, the characters struggle and wrestle with this question but Suzanne Collins hersel doesn't know the answer...the answer is "you are having a dream." Wake up! Wake up Suzanne Collins. In the second book she attempts to make it seem like Katniss will inspire or even lead a revolution in this corrupt dystopia...and maybe sort of she does. But it's all completley unwitting. She's a pawn even of the revolutionaries. Besides, since we don't really know anything much about the society, its governmental system, its foundation and maintenance, this is NOT 1984 (although I'm sure Collins would like to imagine for herself that it is.) Finally, I am left thinking of Harry Potter, how J.K. Rowling wants her readers to feel the weight of each death in that book, of the good characters and the bad, the complex and the simple. Cedric Diggory is a minor character in some ways but his death is not minor. Harry will die to return his body to his parents. This is fiction that raises us up, that asks the best of us, the believes in the best in us. Collins treats most of her characters like figures in an X-Box game, choosing one or two for us to mourn a little and then focusing on dispensing with her legions in all kinds of creative and inventive weighs. My final take on these books? Plenty of action, the kids will gobble it up, bu they'll be as morally hungry when they are done as if they had been playing Mortal Combat. Let 'em read them, but please, parents, read them yourself and start a discussion about real revolutionaries, real courage, and real sacrifice.