Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

These books are fast-paced and easy to read, but speaking as both an English teacher and a hardcore lover of YA fiction, they are absolutely terrible literature. The setting of a dystopian society wherein children are pitted against one another to the death in an annual melee ABSOLUTELY BEGS for a strong moral message. A message of humanity, hope, compassion, the darkness AND the lightness in each person, forgiveness, sacrifice, redemption... And the call is completely unanswered. There is no moral message that comes through, not for the characters and not for the readers. I read and read, waiting for the characters to develop, to come to understandings, to break through and open up and help us, the readers, realize along with them that even if things are bleak and wretched there can be hope, we can still maintain our dignity and humanity and compassion. We can learn from our mistakes. We can be the better person. We can overcome. Nope! Suzanne Collins instead makes the reader part of the audience to a sad and violent reality show where we're super excited and horrified to see who's gunna git killed next. The story is dark and depressing and shallow. Aaaand poorly written. The crazy-hard moral dilemma of our would-be heroine Katniss - in which she must kill or be killed - should REALLY bring out some character-building, impossibly complex ethical predicaments, right? Again, no. When Katniss kills another child in the arena, we always feel that he really deserved it. He was an a-hole. He was dangerous. We all love us some good old fashioned black-and-white characters. Bad guys are always easy to kill. When Katniss begins to like one of her opponents and frets over the "one of us is going to have to kill the other" situation, the other character is killed off by one of the bad guys. Whew. Glad we didn't have to face that one. How frickin' convenient. And how horribly shallow and irresponsible. Instead of really digging into the obvious issue of "Dude, these are a bunch of kids fighting to the death for an audience and that's super horrible", Collins makes the fighting itself the focus and intrigue, rather than a platform from which to tackle real, deep issues. Ugh. I just wanted these books to be so much more. But they weren't.