Shelf Life

Collins became a best-selling author with her highly acclaimed “Underland Chronicles” series (Gregor the Overlander, etc.). While that series is popular with some high school kids it is aimed at a jr. high audience. The Hunger Games, with its 16-year-old protagonist, is aimed squarely at high school students (but jr. high students and adults will eat it up as well). This novel is a strong entrant in one of my favorite genres, the dystopian future science fiction story. The Hunger Games will hold it’s own along side Nancy Farmer’s House of the Scorpion, M.T. Anderson’s Feed and classics like 1984.

Katniss Everdeen, an acomplished poacher of wild animals, lives in District 12, the coal-mining region of the country of Panem. Located in the remaining habitable regions of a devastated North America, Panem’s 12 districts are harshly ruled by the distant Capitol. Each year, as a form of entertainment and a brutal expression of the Capitol’s absolute control, a boy and girl from each district are forced to compete in the Hunger Games. This is the ultimate reality show in which the contestants fight to the death before a live TV audience. All citizens are required to watch. Only one contestant will survive. Can Katinis, who has spent her life just barely avoiding hunger, hope to compete against bigger, stronger rivals from the richer districts? Will her drunken mentor help her or only speed her death? And will the government stack the odds to guarantee that a more acceptable candidate wins?

This story has complex and believable characters, political intrigue, romance, and tons of exciting action. The only down-side? It’s the first in a series and the next one won’t be out for quite a while.

Highly recommended for grades 7-12.

By Mr. Doyle

I must admit that it was with a little trepidation that I started reading this book. Card’s “Ender” series and the companion “Shadow” series are among the best books I have ever read. I want to like everything Card writes but I just couldn’t get into his “Homecoming” series and I am not normally a fantasy reader (yes, I am one of those sf snobs who has to grit his teeth every time I walk into a bookstore and see all of the fantasy mixed in with the science fiction– they’re different genres!!). To top it off, this book features an entirely African-American cast of characters. Orson Scott Card is not African-American. Neither am I but my wife and kids are so I was actually afraid that Card would commit one of two common mistakes white writers make when writing African-American characters: create stereotypical, one-dimensional character or write white characters and call them black. To my relief he did neither. In the afterword Card explains why he wrote a book with African-American characters and how avoided these pitfalls. It’s an interesting story.

So the characterization is well done but is the story worth reading? Absolutely. This is no Ender’s Game (but then, what books is?) but it is an original and very readable story. Card takes characters from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream and inserts them into a middle and upper middle class African-American neighborhood in modern day Los Angeles. People’s wishes and dreams become weapons in a war between magical beings. At the center of the battle is Mack Street, a changeling found in plastic grocery bag in a flood basin by 12-year-old Ceese Tucker. Mack is taken in by Ms. Smircher who raises him with Ceese’s help, the older boy becoming a nanny/older brother to the unusual foundling. Mack discovers early on that he posses a powerful gift that, unchecked, hurts the people around him. So he learns to control it– at least he thinks he does.

On one of his habitual walks Mack notices something out of the corner of his eye. Imperceptible to everyone else, he has found an entrance into another world. He learns that this new realm is inextricably linked to the real world. He also learns that his unusual gift is to be used in a terrible battle that will cross the boundary between the two worlds and could destroy all those he knows and loves.

As in most of his writings, Card infuses the story with large doses of morality. And, as in Ender’s Game and other books Card makes his heroes and villains sometimes morally ambiguous. The climax has plenty of imaginative action and the writing is very good. This is a great addition to high school fantasy collections.

By Mr. Doyle