Book review: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

It may sound like an oxymoron but some books are excitedly anticipated with a feeling of terrible dread...

Take The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ brilliant science fiction teen thrillers set in a dystopian fantasy world where child kills child and savagery is a part of everyday life.

Mockingjay is the final instalment of what has been a terrific teen trilogy and it brings both the promise of a scintillating last chapter and the disappointment that the life of Katniss Everdeen will soon be a closed book.

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Currently in production as a film, The Hunger Games series has been truly addictive, providing non-stop action and human drama within a complex moral and political framework.

The setting might be futuristic and abstract but the subject matter, which includes indiscriminate violence and killing, mental torture and moral blackmail, resonates uncomfortably with some aspects of life in the 21st century.

Collins’ heroine is the unforgettable Katniss, a 16-year-old with the weight of her terrible world on her young shoulders.

Against all the odds, she has twice survived the sadistic Hunger Games in which youthful combatants are forced to fight to the death in a reality television-style tournament.

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Katniss’ country is Panem, a grim and grotesque land where a downtrodden population lives and works in numbered, featureless districts strictly controlled by the Capitol, who brook no opposition and wage brutal internecine wars.

Mockingjay sees the return of Katniss to her home in District 12, now a charred ruin since the area was firebombed by the Capitol as punishment for her role in an insurrection at the last games.

Her guilt is overwhelming...more than 90 per cent of the district’s population is dead because of her and the rest are refugees in the alien District 13.

But there is no retreat for Katniss...she must put aside her feelings of anger, distrust and grief and become the Mockingjay, the symbol of rebellion, and turn herself into the leader, the voice, the embodiment of revolution...whatever the personal cost.

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Because unless she acts, no-one will be safe, not her family, not her friends Peeta and Gale, and certainly not what remains of the people of District 12...

Love, loss, heartbreak, the futility of war, the search for freedom and human resilience all play leading roles in this compelling and sometimes shocking story.

Mockigjay does not disappoint...an epic and emotionally powerful conclusion to a momentous series.

(Scholastic, paperback, £6.99)

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