Dystopian literature has always been one of my favorite subgenres of literature, so once I got into Hunger Games, I was completely engrossed. It’s perfect YA literature; written at a level that teenagers can understand, but engrossing enough to make me, as an adult, unable to put it down.
Hunger Games does exactly what dystopian literature is supposed to do. It yanks the reader out of their comfort zone and into a different reality, then forces the reader to look at things from that perspective. It reframes current issues in such a way as to make one think about them.I was truly impressed, and on the edge of my seat for Catching Fire, the sequel.
We are, in many ways, a decadent society, intent on our bread and circuses. Hunger Games captures that. There’s a metaphor here for the way America treats the rest of the world, the way our prosperity is often built on the backs of those less fortunate. And this book provides a foothold to present these concepts to my students. This is a book I definitely plan to use in the future.
