A couple of months ago, on Fish's recommendation, I bought and read "The Giver" with the belief that I was going to give it to TEA to read. It ended up being far to dark for a then seven year old and I put it away for when he was a little older.
However, it did re-introduce me to the genre of young adult dystopian fiction (from now on, it will be referred to as YADF) which was a genre that I loved growing up. Think of the great ones from your youth: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Alas, Babylon and all those short stories that popped up. They changed my world view. One of the things that I loved about these books and stories was that there was no magic. It was a fantastic world but one that played by real world rules.
I read some of the Harry Potter series and the magic bothered me. The same problem existed with Pullman's Dark Materials series (but I could use the Clarke quote (See Law 3) here, because it was science-based even though it was fantastic) and I couldn't get into them.
Over the past couple of weeks, a number of people had mentioned The Hunger Games (including the good people on the Slate Political Gabfest) but when my friend Heather mentioned that she was reading it about a week ago, it fully hit my radar. Then as I was running some errands yesterday, the book was endorsed on Slate's Culture Gabfest, and I knew that I had to have it.
So, I purchased it and read it and I am hating Heather and the others that promoted this book. Why? Because it is the first of three and it is really good. Like I want to run out right now and get the second book right now good.
This story is set in a post apocalyptic America after a civil war and each area (or District) has two select two (one of each gender) children between the ages of twelve and eighteen to compete in the Hunger Games which is a combination of Thunderdome and Survivor.
Any more than that and I will give away too much of the story. What I can say is that even though these are YADF novels, at no point do they become condescending to the reader, and if you have some idea of what is going on now, you will be well prepared to understand the world (and you can figure out with area gets blown (literally) off the map).
Here is the perfect book (or books, I will get the other two tomorrow) for the cold winter that is still upon us.
I loved The Giver too. Enjoy The Hunger Games. I liked the second book better and really despised the third book, but I think it may have been less offensive if the expectations of waiting a year for it's publishing weren't there. Regardless, you'll be ahead of the curve when The Hunger Games movie comes out in March 2012.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Carrie. I banged out The Hunger Game while busing it back and forth yesterday evening and this morning.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things I love about YA fiction is how quickly it goes.