Book Review 8: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games 

Genres: Dystopian, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction, Survival Story, Action, American Literature

Reading Level: Young Adult 

Setting: Panem (Fictionalized future society of North America)

Published: 2008

Page Count: 436 (Paperback)

Content Warnings: Child Death

Rating: ★★★★⭑ (4.5 out of 5)

Am I reviewing Suzanne Collins' classic young adult dystopian novel The Hunger Games in the year 2025? Yes. Why? Because it feels so deeply relevant to the world we are living in today. You could perhaps be forgiven if your memories of this book are largely about a teenage love triangle set against the backdrop of a corrupt society (as most young adult dystopians of the era were). This was the aspect of the book that most readers chose to focus on at the time, especially its younger audience, and of course, the filmmakers played up this angle of the story in the film adaptations, making it one of the main selling points of the franchise. But after rereading The Hunger Games as an adult, I am here to officially say that the romance/love triangle aspect of the book is actually the least compelling part of the story. Suzanne Collins had way more important things she was trying to get across that only get more relevant as time goes on, and by buying into the Team Peeta or Team Gale shipping nonsense, we are only falling into a trap that Collins so cleverly constructed to write a dystopian novel that holds an a mirror up to its audience and shows us perhaps an uncomfortable reflection of ourselves.

When reading this book for the first time at twelve years old, I saw Katniss Everdeen (the sixteen year old protagonist of the novel) as a stereotypical feminine heroine, and therefore was annoyed at the progression of her character's overarching trauma. I cared mainly to see Katniss take out bad guys and was rooting for her to end up with her fellow star-crossed-lover Peeta Mellark. I, as an immature tween, fell right into the trap that Collins baited me into. You see, Katniss lives in a dystopian, future American society where the new country in America's place (Panem) is ruled by a sadistic dictatorship that controls every aspect of people's lives and the media, which culminated in a yearly ritualistic sporting event in which twenty-four adolescent children between the ages of 12 to 18 are forcibly trapped in an arena and have to fight to the death until one lone survivor remains. In order to help Katniss and her district-mate Peeta be more "appealing" to the audience to these Hunger Games (the privileged, vapid, and downright cruel Capitol citizens who are exempt from sending their kids to the Games), Katniss and Peeta's mentor Haymitch conconcts and weaves a tale of a love story between Katniss and Peeta, turning them into two star-crossed-lovers who fate has cruelly placed as enemies in the arena where only one can come out alive. Throughout her time in the arena, Katniss has to play up this angle to try and get sponsors to send her food and medicine and, well, you know, things she cannot survive without. She has to pretend to fall in love with Peeta to save her own life (as well as Peeta's too).

As a kid, the greater meaning of this was lost on me. I thoughtlessly tore through the entire book, buying into the faux love story, waiting anxiously for Katniss and Peeta to end up together for real. It didn't dawn on me that I was doing in real life exactly what the villainous Capitol citizens in the book, whom Collins was so heavily criticizing and condemning. I cared more about a petty teenage love story than I did about the fact that it was a story about oppression, dictatorship, and children being brutally slaughtered for sport. What's worse, adult readers of the book back in its heyday did the same thing. What's worst, the filmmakers who claimed to care about the story and adapted it for the screen did too. They routinely toned down the violence of what was occurring, lacked in developing the truly disturbing, oppressive aspects of life in Panem, cast adults to play the teenagers, so that they would be more attractive on screen, and heightened up the romance and subsequent love triangle to bait viewers into watching the films. We, as the real world audience, did exactly what the Capitol did in the book itself, we became exactly what Collins was warning her audience against becoming--vapid, naive sheep who were willing to overlook appalling cruelty because we only cared to see if Katniss was going to fall in love with Peeta.

This is why I highly recommend a former reader of The Hunger Games as a child re-read the book as an adult, and especially to sit with the discomfort that may arise as you seriously consider the themes of the book, and how similar you may be to someone from the Capitol.

Genuinely speaking, I need to ask, why did so many of us who read this series want Katniss to fall in love with Peeta for real? I'm not talking about in the love triangle way, like ending up with Peeta instead of Gale. Readers of The Hunger Games have been beating to death the reasons why they don't like Katniss and Gale together since the series first came out, and since Gale isn't really a highly present character in the first book, I'm not going to go on a long tirade rehashing those same dialogues here. What I mean is that, I am firmly in the "Katniss should not have ended up with Peeta or Gale" camp. As a child reader, I can see why I gravitated towards shipping Katniss with Peeta. He was a major character present in the books, so it was just easy for me to get attached to his character, and when I was twelve, I wasn't a nuanced enough book analyzer yet to understand that I could care about both Katniss and Peeta's characters separately, without wanting them to end up together in a romantic relationship. I mean, first and foremost, Katniss and Peeta are a couple of traumatized sixteen-year-olds; they are really, psychologically, in no place to be developing a healthy romantic relationship. In fact, I would go so far as to say that their relationship as a whole was actually more of a trauma bond than real, healthy love. It would be one thing if I believed that Katniss genuinely had romantic feelings for Peeta going into the Arena, but it really felt one-sided. Peeta had been secretly crushing on Katniss for years. Creepiness of his quietly watching Katniss for years aside, it also highlights the class divide between them' Katniss was a Seam girl from the poorest parts of District Twelve, and Peeta was a popular, Merchant-class kid. It never would have been acceptabe for him to chase after her, so he never did. How, exactly, is that romantic? Katniss felt she owed Peeta a debt for saving her from starvation once. Katniss pretends to be in love with Peeta for the cameras to save their lives, but she is absolutely acting. She is also only tolerating Peeta, who literally teamed up with the Careets to hunt her down. It's not exactly reading like a healthy love story, at least from Katniss' perspective, and I think that was the point Collins was trying to make.

The whole idea is that Katniss has to pretend to be in love with someone she is indifferent to because it gives the people of the Capitol a reason to like her, sympathize with her, to want to see her live. The fact that children being forced to murder each other is wrong isn't enough. I believe that's why Collins doesn't really write Katniss and Peeta's relationship (at least in this first novel) to come across as traditionally romantic. I don't believe that she wanted us to need a real romance to root for the characters' survival. She wanted us to root for Katniss because what happened to her was sick and wrong. She wanted us to root for Peeta because saving two childrens' lives instead of just one is the morally right thing to do. She didn't want us to fall into the trap of only caring about their survival because of some will-they-won't-they, trite love story that has been done a million times before in other stories. That is what the Capitol did, and when readers (and the filmmakers, eventuall) started to believe the Katniss/Peeta romance was the most important aspect of the story, they proved how much like the Captiol they truly are. The novel indeed holds a very unflattering mirror up to society, but are most readers looking closely enough to see the ugly truth? I don't think they are, but I think Collins is a genius in the way she crafted it. Ultimately, Katniss' desire to get herself and Peeta both out of the Arena alive once it's an option isn't some indication of her secretly harboring love for Peeta. Rather, it is an indication of how in-tune Katniss is to the unjust reality of the Hunger Gams. She doesn't particularly like Peeta at that point in time, but she knows he is a victim of the Capitol's cruelty too, and that helping save his life is right. That is how I choose to read the novel too. It isn't a love story. It's a survival story.

Although, there is a certain feminist perspective that could be taken in veiwing Katniss and Peeta's

relationship as a more traditional romance story. Katniss is often the hero coming to the rescue to save their lives, whereas Peeta is the one who is often helpless and in need of saving constantly. It's an interesting reversal of the traditional gender roles and tropes in fiction, but it doesn't change my stance that I don't think their story is genuinely romantic.

That all being said, by focusing so much of my review so far on the romance/faux-romance subplot, I am also falling in the trap, so the rest of the review will be about the more important aspects of The Hunger Games and the allegories they show about the real world.

Here are just some of the real-world critiques that I have interpreted from the book. There are, obviously, other interpretations and comparisons that can be drawn:

• Class Divide: In District 12, where Katniss is from, everyone is quite poor in comparison to the wealth of the Capitol and also in comparison to the higher districts with closer relations to the Captiol, like districts 1 and 2. However, class divide within District 12 itself still exists. Katniss comes from a part of District 12 known as the Seam, where poverty and food insecurity is at some of the worst in Panem. Katniss is forced to illegally hunt in the woods to supply her family with enough food to keep them alive, which is a stark contrast to the Merchant class, where Peeta comes from, where the people don't exactly have a surplus of wealth, but they have enough to get by, can afford nicer clothes and treats every once in a while, and where the kids would never have to take the Tesserae--a program in which the Capitol gives desperate families extra food in exchange for putting their kids' names in the Reaping for the Games more times, which increases the likelihood of poor kids dying in the Games. This reflects a frightening reality in American (and also the greater global) status quo of wealth and class. While all people are not doing well in comparison to the ultra rich elites who tend to run the country (billionaires and millionaires hold most of the wealth), but that doesn't mean that middle class individuals know the same struggle as poor and working class people in the United States. Many discussions and policies that seek to ease financial burdens are often tailored for the middle class and don't relieve the struggle of the lowest income folks in the country, leading to what many believe will cause a dissolving of the middle class all together; there will ultimately be only the rich and the poor. The rich get richer, the poor stay poor, and moving between classes is becoming increasingly impossible no matter the circumstances. It is also worth noting that we live in a world where multiple people are billionaires (not millionaires, billionaires) when thousands upon thousands more live in devasting poverty in a world where capitalism dictates that one needs money and/or material wealth to thrive. Perhaps that is why Suzanne Collins named the Capitol the Capitol--it is a criticism of capitalism. At the very least, it highlights the wealth gap, as the people of the Capitol hoard their wealth and resources just like the ultra rich in the real world. 
• Population Concentration: While we don't spend a lot of time exploring what every day life is like for the other districts of Panem, we know that in District 12 there is a massive chain-link fence that is supposed to be electric (though often isn't) that cages the people of District 12 inside District 12. It prevents them from freely moving amongst other districts in Panem, moving outside of Panem's territory, or even utilizing the abudance of survival resources of the forests of District 12, which despite being part of 12's land, was restricted as Captiol land and is off-limits to the people who actually live in District 12. This reality of District 12 reminds me so much of the reality that Palestinians in occupied Palestine live with under decades of Israeli occupation. In the Gaza strip, the blockade was also quite literally a massive fence to cage the population in, preventing freedom of travel in or out of Gaza for the Palestinians, which isolated them from the world and also prevented Palestinians in Gaza from being able to utilize resources or engaging in importing and exporting, to build their economy and help their standard of living improve. Also, much like the woods of District 12, Palestinians in Gaza are unable to fully utilize the resources of the Mediterranean Sea on their coast, as the water is controlled completely by Israel. The land, air, and sea blockade of Gaza left the Palestinians insided essentially dependent on their occupier and whatever supplies the occupying power was willing to give them to survive, which makes ending the occupation nearly impossible and allows Israel to retain full control and power over the Palestinians. This, too, is what is happening in District 12. The people of 12 cannot stand on their own without the Capitol, because the Capitol controls therir resources entirely, allowing them to maintain ultimate power. It is also not unsimilar to the reality of Palestinians in the West Bank either. The separation barrier, while not completely the same as the Gaza blockade, largely has the same results in the grand scheme of things for the West Bank; it helps maintain Israeli power over Palestine. 
• Communicative Division: In Panem, communication between the districts in essentially non-existent, nor does it appear that the Capitol citizens have direct contact with citizens in the districts. The people of District 12 know what their own reality is and what their struggles are, but they aren't aware of what the situation on the ground is for people in District 8 or District 2. The people of District 1 may feel the struggle and injustice of sending their kids into the Arena, but do they know the brutality of the poverty, starvation, and manual labor of the people in District 12. Do the people of the Capitol even have any awareness of what life is like in the Districts, because it doesn't seem like they do. This lack of communication between peoples--both the oppressed and their oppressors--helps to prevent opposition from growing. How can the people of the Capitol oppose starving District 12 if they don't know that the people in District 12 are starving at all. The only time they ever see the kids from the districts is after they have been brought to the Capitol for the Games--in which their Capitol teams have already strategically overfed them and beautified them by Capitol standards, so the people of the Capitol would hever know from looking at them how harsh their lives were prior. And how can people from among the different districts share their stories of how the Capitol oppresses them and coordinate resistance with each other, if they cannot communicate with each other at all? The answer to both questions is that they can't, and that helps stamp out opposition from within and rebellion from the oppressed. This exists in many examples in the world. To utilize my previous example of Palestine, the blockade of Gaza actively prevents journalists from being able to collect information on the suffering of the people of Gaza and report it around the world, leading many people who may otherwise be well-intentioned to remain ignorant about the war crimes and human rights violations occuring around them. The communication blockade of Gaza also prevents Palestinians there from connecting in meaningful ways with their fellow countrymen in the West Bank. It makes it harder for Palestinians to form a collective resistance to occupation and strategize an effective autonomous rule when they cannot even communicate effectively with one another, which makes it easier for Israel to assert its power over the Palestinians, when their is no unity in any form of resistance. Which brings me directly to my next point... 
• Divide and Conquer Warfare: The idea of dividing ones enemies among each other, so that they cannot effectively join forces against their shared threat is a tactic as old as, well, probably the concept of war itself. It is demonstrated in The Hunger Games in the way that the Capitol favors some districts and gives them explicit advantages that other districts lack, thereby creating competition among the differing districts of Panem. We see this frequently throughout the book--many of the "Career" tribues (that is, those who grew up in districts 1, 2, and 4, with close ties to the Capitol, more wealth and resources, who get trained in advance to be able to win the Hunger Games, and therefore win the most frequently, have more mentors available to train future generations, and therefore continue to train better skilled tributes to continue the cycle all over again) team up against Katniss, who is from an "outlying," poor district once they start to realize that she may be a real threat to the victory of one of their own. All throughout her time in the Arena, Katniss frequently sees the Career tributes from District 2, Cato and Clove, as her enemy that she needs to defeat in order to win. It isn't inherently untrue; if Katniss does not beat them, they will kill her. It is necessary to save her own life. However, through her time fighting in the Arena, she never really cognitively comes to terms with the fact that Cato and Clove are also children who were ripped unjustly from their homes to fight to the death. They are in the same situation as Katniss. If they don't kill her, she will kill them. It leads to a false narrative, perhaps not specifically in Katniss' mind, but in the readers' minds that Cato or Clove are villains, that they are inherently evil or wrong or the antagonist because they are trying to kill Katniss, our heroine. This isn't the case, though. They are just as muched the victims of the society they live in as Katniss is, albeit with more privilege than her. At the end of the day, even after Katniss wins, nothing has really been won now that Cato is dead. The Hunger Games still exist, District 12 is still starving, President Snow still has ultimate power, and it will all happen again for some more poor kids the following year. And if the story had been told from Clove's perspective, say, instead of Katniss,' perhaps Katniss would look much like the villain from Clove's eyes too. That is part of what makes it touching when Katniss ultimately kills Cato to put him out of his misery at being mauled by the mutts at the end of the book. Somewhere, she recognizes he isn't her real enemy. Perhaps in a different life, they even could have fought together as brothers-in-arms against the Capitol. This is all so very reflective of real life. The two-party political divide of Democrats versus Republicans in the United States' government has stagnated so severely that it is largely impossible for any real progress or meaningful work to occur in Washington D.C. It makes the average American nearly powerless to do anything about the growing wealth gap, food prices, housing prices, lack of affordable education and healthcare and childcare, to secure rights for women and LGBTQ+ groups, or acheive racial equity when the only thing that really happens on the House and Senate floor is infighting. The Democrats and Republics are too busy fighting each other than to do anything to better the country or the people. It made it oh-so easy for Trump and his Maga-reich and neo-fascist regime to take over--no one was working together to prevent the greater threat. And following my previous thread, divide plagues the quest for Palestine's liberation as well. With Gaza and the West Bank geographically divided, it created different quasi-governmental branches seeking a future independence of Palestine, and coexistence isn't always easy. With many different factions with different ideas and ambitions, there is often too much in-fighting for a solid movement for justice and independence in Palestine to take shape.  
• Policing/Collaboration from Within: Collaboration is also as old as war and government too (probably). In The Hunger Games, we see it in the Peacekeepers, some of whom aren't from the Capitol, but they are from the Districts, seeking better lives for themselves by helping to oppress other citizens of Panem from the districts. We also see it in the higher, "Career" districts, in the way that they openly embrace the Games and even lean into them, such as training their own children to be so lethal and desensitized to the violence of the Games, that they actually want to volunteer for them--all to increase their district's standing in favor with the Capitol. There is no shortage of this in any part in the world, collaborators and spies against their own nation or people have cropped up in nearly every conflict. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has often been accused of serving Israel's interests over Palestine's. And policing or collaboration from within doesn't always necessarily occur out of a place of selfishness or malice. Some people go into with good intentions and the idea of creating real change. In the United States, police departments are often discriminatory and racist, and we have often seen the violent force that cops use against Black people in America. Despite this, some BIPOC have become cops in the hopes of creating systemic change withing American policing. The intentions they have may be good, but ultimately, most will agree that American policing has not become any less racist at any point in time, even in the wake of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. Those who have gone into policing with good intentions may individually do good, but they haven't changed the system, and are ultimately still working to enforce its status quo. The same is true in fictional Panem. The people of District 12 are not less oppressed or suffering any less when it is Peacekeepers from the Districts beating and arresting them, rather than Peacekeepers from the Capitol. The people of districts 1, 2, and 4 have not changed their status quo, either, by embracing the Hunger Games. They still have to send their kids to the Reaping to potentially die every year to serve the Capitol, regardless or whether they train for it or not. They have simply accepted life under the Capitol's oppression for what it is, and also set themselves up with more to lose should the Capitol's regime ever fall, because they rely on support from the Capitol for the lives they are used to living in a way other districts do not. 
• Media Control: It is obvious in The Hunger Games that President Snow and the Capitol control the media. Obviously, they would have to in order ot be able to air the slaughter of children on screen live as a celebrated sporting event, but keep the majority of the Capitol's population ignorant, or at least desensitized, to the every day suffering in the districts. They also manipulate the reality behind media to their own advantage, which is highlighted throughout the way that the Gamemakers will use technology to nudge the Games to go the way they want, so that they can create an entertaining story that the people of the Capitol will enjoy, that keeps themselves looking good, and while may be based on things that really happened to their victims, are anything but reality--such as the way it is played up to look like they were generous with Katniss and Peeta in letting them both survive the Arena because of the popularity of their love story. Yes, ultimately they did let both of them survive the Arena, and their faux-love story was popular with the people of the Capitol, but that story wasn't the real truth. In reality, the Capitol was trying to set up Katniss and Peeta to have to turn on each other until one killed the other, but Katniss outsmarted them, so they let them both live because they had to, otherwise they would look weak. It wasn't generosity or empathy for young love. It was a strategic move to maintain power. Media control might not be as overt as this in real life--or maybe it is, after all, Donald Trump is trying to shut down public broadcasting and talk show hosts who speak against him and cut funding to universities across the U.S. But media control does exist. We see it in the way that news outlets manipulate the way they tell a story to try and influence your opinion. When Israelis are victimized in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they are slaughtered. They are hostages. It is their children who suffer. And all of that is true, it is rightfully meant to garner sympathy for innocent Israeli victims. The issue is that when it is Palestinians who suffer, they "die as a result of military action." They are "political prisoners and detainees being held without charge." They are "minors under the age of eighteen." In other words, hostages and children, and they are being slaughtered. But it benefits the U.S. to maintain close ties with Israel, so they want to sell Israel's side of the story only, which means they can't have the American people empathizing with the Palestinians' plights. People empathize more with suffering children, whereas a suffering "person under eighteen" might not even conciously register in a lot of people's mind as being a child. Hostages are victims, but the word prisoner invokes the idea that their detention was in response to some sort of crime committed. When people are slaughtered, there is outrage. But if they "die as a result of military strikes," it implies that it was accidental or unavoidable, that they were not, too, murdered in an active of political violence. It is media control at its finest to manipulate the narrative people are digesting. Journalists in wars and conflict zones are often persecuted, arrested, and killed to stop them from spreading knowledge of human rights violations occurring, currently most notably in Gaza, but also in other places in the world in other wars as well. Most people in Gen-Z or the tail-end of the millennial generation have probably seen the Internet memes about posts that are "illegal" in Russia because they make fun of Russian president Vladimir Putin, but the reality of these jokes are not actually a joking matter. Any country that seeks to control what content people can and cannot read or have access to for no other reason than to maintain its own image and power is asserting media control over those people to prevent them from obtaining information that may not be favorable in the eyes of the government. This is a terrifying dystopian reality, whether it happens in the U.S. or Russia, or anywhere else for that matter, because if it goes unchecked, we could end up in a situation where we don't know what's really true, where we can't trust the people who are supposed to lead us to be honest with is, and therefore, how do we know if we're safe? Collins clearly saw it coming, a decade and a half ago when she wrote The Hunger Games, that this is the direction that the world was headed as media became increasingly easier for people all over the world to access, and if only we had listened to her warning. 
• Technological Artificial Intelligence: Some may not necessarily regonize the way that artificial intelligence exists in the world of Panem. Largely because AI wasn't such a mainstream concept in 2008 when The Hunger Games was written, so Suzanne Collins' idea of how AI might look in a future reality aren't quite the same as the reality today in 2025, but the broader concerns are the same. In the novel, one aspect of a sort of artificial intelligence (or perhaps I should call it an artificial life form?) is the mutts. The wolf-like beasts that create the grand finale for the audience during Katniss' Games are not real wolves. They aren't really real animals at all, because they were artifically created by the Gamemakers. Despite being artificial, though, the creatures are somewhat intelligent. They have the same drive to hunt prey that a real wolf would, only they have been engineered to hunt and kill the kids in the Arena (and creepily given the same eyes as the slain tributes from the same Games). It seems they have even retained some aspect of the personalities of the slain tributes they were modeled after, being fed an artifical personality that could harbor violent grudes for their deaths against those remaining tributes. There are also Tracker Jackers--genetically engineered wasps that were created to kill like a semi-animally intelligent weapon. Oviously, this is not how AI developed in the real world, but the concerns about the utilization of AI for nefarious purposes still exists. Where in Panem it is used as an explicit weapon to kill tributes in the Arena, AI in the real world can create facial recognition on people and surveillance them illegally. It can mimic human voices so accurately that scammers can use it to create fake phone calls of distress to people's loved ones to try and steal money from them. AI can pilot drones that can be used to drop bombs on people and kill them. It is far from the same thing as artifically created mutts that chase us down and maul us, but that doesn't mean it isn't dangerous when unrestricted or used with malintent. And if it continues to go unchecked, who knows what else it could potentially develop into in the future? The scariest thing about the Tracker Jackers in the book is that while they are artifically created, it isn't directly stated or implied that the Capitol has control over them once they're out and about to stop their rampage. If we don't check ourselves in the development and use of AI, we could end up creating dangerous artificial things that we can't control either. 
• Beauty Standards: This may seem like a small thing in comparison to the larger issues described above, but I felt compelled to discuss it because it is so, so eerily similar to our reality right now its frightening. In the world of Panem, the people of the Capitol have some interesting fashion trends to say the least. They frequently dye their hair or wear colorful wigs, and sometimes they even dye their own skin differently colors. The people often sport very bold styles and colors of clothing and accessories. They wear exessive amounts of makeup and are obsessed with maintaining a youthful appearance. In the most eerie comparison, they are also obesessed with removing body hair. In fact, there is an entire chapter dedicated to Katniss' prep team working tirelessly to remove all her body hair. Is all this sounding a bit too close to home? While the exaggerated appearances of the Capitol citizens may seem a bit over the top or perhaps even hard to believe for some readers, it is important to note two things on that. One: this is taking place in the future. I'm sure people from the 1700s would find our current fashions and trends exaggerated and hard to believe are real too. Two: it is a metaphor of sorts. The Capitol citizens look the most freakish to people from the districts, those who do not have the wealth or the freedom or the time to care about materialistic things. They are spending all of their resources and efforts on just trying to survive at all, not playing with the way that they look. It is the people of the Capitol who have the luxury of being able to change their appearances. They have the money to buy these trendy cosmetics and clothes, and they are not spending their time on basic surival, so why not? This is where Collins actually makes a very scathing criticism of the global West, because we do have these same extreme (and perhaps even sometimes ridiculous) beauty trends. We dye our hair, we get tattoos and peircings on our skin. Clothing trends shift and change on nearly a yearly basis nowadays, and yes, we too are obsessed with maintaining youth. Skin creams, wrinkle creams, retinol, lip filler, implants, butt lifts, boob jobs, steroids that make your abs and muscles look toned, veneers. All of this to maintain an expensive, and quite honestly, unrealistic standard of beauty that people simply aren't actually born with, just like Panem's Capitol folks. I'm not morally judging anyone for engaging in these practices. I'm one of those people. I have tattoos and piercings, I wear makeup, and I have had my hair colored before. I put on fake nails sometimes for a quick manicure. It is part of Western society, for better or worse, whether we like it or not. But people need to come to terms with what a privilege and luxury our fashion and beauty trends really are. Because just like in Panem, not everyone can afford all of the cosmetic materials and procedures needed to partake and maintain these standards. Collins is, once again, forcing us to look in the mirror for one second and realize how our obsession with beauty might look to those who do not share this cultural value, especially when juxtaposed on aspects of life that are more serious. Katniss concerns herself with having enough food to keep herself, her little sister, and her mentally ill mother alive after their father died. Her prep team concern themselves with making sure her legs are fully shaved and her makeup is flattering because they don't want her to look unappealing on camera. These two things are not the same. This is, unfortunately, the real world. American media reports often stand on camera in fancy clothing and jewelry, high heels, perfect pearly white smiles, and flawless hair and makeup while reporting on slaughters and starvation and natural disasters that destroy people's entire lives in other places in the world, unconcerned with how privileged they look because those slaughters, starvation, and natural disasters are not their lives. To them, it is just their job. In that way, we're really not so unlike Effie Trinket or Katniss' vapid prep team. 
• Sexualization of Children: In the age of Epstein and Catholic priest scandals and the confessions of former Nickelodeon child stars, I don't really think I have to explain how this exists in our current world. It exists in Panem too, of course, with the way the children going into the Arena have to be primed and beautified to make them appealling to the Capitol audience. Katniss even goes so far as to describe how Glimmer, the District 1 female tribute, wears a see-through dress, playing her angle to the audience as "sexy" to garner support. 
• Dissent from Within: Not every person in the Capitol supports what the Capitol is doing to the districts in full. One prime example of Capitol citizens who are actually empathetic to the children being forced into the Arena is Katniss' stylist Cinna, who actually personally requested to work with District 12, because as the poorest and least favorable district in Panem, District 12 rarely ever pulls the necessary resources from Capitol sponsorship to bring home a victor, and Cinna wants to help the District 12 kids from within to change that and help bring a survivor from 12 back home. It is, to an extent, a dissent to the way his own society operates, as the last thing Snow or the Capitol government wants is for Capitol citizens to have any form of empathy for those from the districts at all, which Cinna does. But it is important to note that (at least in this first novel; we're not reviewing Catching Fire yet!) Cinna's dissent and empathy aren't changing the system, aren't acheiving justice, and he is not really putting his privilege as someone from the Capitol on the line by doing what he does. He is still working for the Hunger Games instead of shunning and boycotting them all together--which would be much more effective at ending them than simply working from within to help kids from the lower districts. He presumably still reaps the financial benefits of being employed by the Games, and his sucess with Katniss certainly wouldn't hurt his image in Capitol society, the way that out-and-out protesting the Games in the open would. He is dissenting in the smallest way possible while still maintaining his own higher class status and not disrupting the status quo enough to dismantle the oppressive regime itself. Even though he is successful at helping to save Katniss' life and bringing district 12 home a survivor for the first time in twenty-four years, the other children from the Arena are still dead. It is still a tragic injustice and loss of life, and Cinna is still partaking in the system that fuels that injustice. Such is, unfortunately, the reality in many social justice movements in modern history--such as Israelis who want Palestinians to have better rights under Israeli occupation, but who don't actually want to end the occupation of the Palestinian territory itself, or people who don't want to criminalize being gay, but think that individuals should be allowed to have homophobic viewpoints because of their religion without it legally constituting discrimination, or people who want more inclusivity of BIPOC people in American instituitions or support equal racial rights, but they don't think reparations for enslavement should be paid to descendants, or to the Native communities destroyed by colonization. 
• Racial Division: Suzanne Collins does not explicitly state that Panem is segregated based on race, but a careful reading of the novel makes it easy to come to such a conclusion. We know that in District 12, Katniss' mother and Peeta come from the better-off merchant class, who are frequently described as being blonde-haired and blue-eyed, (eg, white), as are several characters from the upper districts that are much better off, characters like Glimmer, but the people of the poorer Seam area where Katniss comes from are described as having olive skin, dark hair, and gray eyes. While the films cast white actors to play the roles of these characters, many fans have always interpreted the characteristics of those from the Seam as being Native American, or perhaps Latino/Latina or of another non-white ethnic community. We also know that the characters from District 11, which is similar to 12 in its economic and social despair, are frequently described as being dark-skinned. Collins, here, is forcing a careful reader to reflect on the way that racial divisions, while not legally enforced anymore, definitely still exist in American society as the direct result of the legacy of enslavement, segreation, and colonization. Panem seems to function the same way. There is no direct implication that the Capitol legally enforces a racially segregated regime, because the characters who are often described as being BIPOC are often the impoverished characters, these are the characters who get trapped in the cycle of poverty, which reflects American society all too well. Though enslavement and segregation legally ended, BIPOC have still been working their way up from a disadvantage, as white families had decades longer to accumulate generations of wealth, power, and influence to pass down to their descendants, those who were segregated, enslaved, and colonized did not have that same luxury. Even today, their descendants start with a great disadvantage in life because of those lasting legacies, which is why D.E.I. initiatives are so important to creating a just and truly equitable American society, and why measures to cutting D.E.I. initiatives are such a frightening prospect. 
• Nuclear Warfare: This topic is only briefly touched on in The Hunger Games, when discussing the fate of the former District 13 (we aren't talking about Mockinjay yet, so hush!) who were bombed entirely out of existence with nuclear weapons for fighting against the Capitol in the Rebellion of the Dark Days. This a concept that should frighten any modern reader, as we live in a world where nuclear weapons currently exist, many countries possess them, global tensions are rising, and no one knows exactly how devastating a full-blown Nuclear war could be across the entire Earth. The fate of District 13 could very well be humanity's fate someday, and we should all be working to prevent that from ever happening. 

There are two things--not necessarily criticisms, but maybe oversights--that needle me about the novel and the series as a whole. 

The bigger of the two is the fate of the rest of the world. We know that Panem exists in the future ruins of North America (presumably Canada, the United States, and Mexico), and we know from the canon of the universe that parts of the current North American continent were submerged in water due to climate change, which drove the foundation of the new country of Panem and changed the landscape as we, the readers, are familiar with it. I don't fault Collins for not revealing exactly how far into the future this is meant to take place, as I thinks he wants future readers to be able to read and resonate with the warnings the story prevents, and to keep it sort of timeless. But what I do fault her for, however, is never fully exploring the rest of the world. Are there other societies and countries still out there, or is Panem all that still exists? If they do exist, do they know what is happening in Panem to the children, and why aren't they helping? Does the Capitol know they exist and are keeping it a secret, or is Panem truly isolated from an outside world? If there are no other societies, what happened to them? What could have caused the collapse of all human society in the rest of the world? Climate change? Nuclear warfare? A combination of factors? Spoiler alert for the prequel novel, but we know from The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes that Lucy Gray wanted to find free people in the North, but what we don't know is if those free people are a society or faction from outside Panem or if she means the survivors of District 13 who survived underground. Also we know from the other prequel, spoiler for Sunrise on the Reaping, that Panem believes that the Capitol controls the entire known world--but the Capitol isn't trustworthy, and this could just be a form of social control. Whether there are or there aren't surviving societies outside of Panem, addressing either reality feels like something directly relevant to the dystopian reality of the series and should have been explored at least a bit more thoroughly. 

The smaller oversight would be the absense of any discussion regarding religion. I'm not saying any religious beliefs are so enternal that they inevitably have to last forever. But what I do find strange is that there is no mention of religion at all, whatsoever. The people of Panem don't seem to have any religious customs, nor do they seem to be aware of any previous religious customs of the societies that predated Panem, which just seems strange given that North America is pretty thoroughly Christian in the modern world. The idea that all knowledge or even concept of religious ideology at all could be eradicated from a society--and I can only presume it was, as there is absolutely no religion at all in the Hunger Games novels--just isn't believable. If this book takes place way in the future, I am willing to believe that North America might not be a mjority Christian place anymore, but I am curious how no other religious ideologies or pactices persisted. Human societies have been practicing religions and spirtual beliefs for thousands of years, and the lack of any such aspect of culture feels like a missing link in the world-building. It is not a huge criticism, just something that feels like a fairly large oversight on Collins' part, espectially given the role that religion can sometimes play in controlling a society, it seems like something that could have factored greatly into the Capitol's playbook. There is also no established diversity of languages spoken in Panem; presumably the entire country speaks the same language, which is interesting because Panem largely composes the modern-day United States, where English and Spanish are both widely spoken. It makes me wonder why there is no diversity of lanuage left in Panem. 

That being said, these are only minor ciritques, as they don't impact the actual plot of the story. It's just something that I, as someone who loves history, politics, culture, anthropology, and human sociology, would have loved to have seen explored more. 

Book review 8 of 5,000 lifetime goal.