Hunger Games

So I finished these three books about a week ago or so. Please note that there will be spoilers so if you don't want to know anything about the story ending and such, please stop reading now.



Okay for those of you that are still here I want to discuss the story and how it works and how I think it doesn't.

First of all, I really enjoyed the series. I felt that the first book was the strongest and best paced, the second has good for what it was setting up and the third I felt was a little sluggish and didn't pick up until about 2/3rd's through it.

I have to respect Mrs. Collins for developing a full world where there are so many working parts. The characters were very believable, especially the main ones. Kat, Peeta, Gale and Haymitch. I liked the relationships that went on between them all. However, the main catalyst to this story, Prim, I felt wasn't quite as believable as the others. This sort of hurt because the ending is supposed to be shocking, but after all is said and done I wasn't attached to her like the others. I felt worse for Peeta than Prim.

The way that the plot unfolded was well done in the first because it sets us up for the world and really gets us involved with the whole Hunger Games world and how the rules work. The second was more of the same except for the fact that now she has the President pressuring her. The tension is raised in the second book, and then in the third when everything hits the fan, I was sort of confused. I think the problem with that is that there is so many different things that Kat is going through, the new environment, the many new characters, her inner conflict on whether to be the mockingjay. What her feelings were for Gale and Peeta. Things that like made it very slow and when she finally went through the one or two chapters of training I was thinking that this is going to be a fast climax and it was. Once she got into the city, people start dying off all around her and some of them we barely got to know, so their deaths are sort of footnotes to her journey.

Now there were some characters from the second book that were stronger like Finnick and his subplot.

Back to the first book. I think that it worked on so many levels because of the fact that I got to know Katniss before and during the games, and I could understand her struggle in the first book.

The struggle is different in the second book as it is a deeper point of the first and then the third book sort of goes in a different direction. In the first book I never really got the sense that she was trying to do any of this uprising stuff, yet by the second book she sort of becomes a pawn of others to start this entire revolution.

The revolution was in full swing by the ending of the second book, and it works well with the third book. However, the first book could stand on its own as there is little to do with the uprising in the first book and I liked that.

So what are your thoughts on these series? Do you think I'm completely out there for my interpretation? Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed reading them all, just fel that the third book was the weakest of them all.