The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. the Hunger Games have begun....

When trying to imagine the Hunger Games think reality TV meets Roman Gladiator fights, in the future. Our protaganist Katniss is a 16 year-old coal miners daughter who poaches to help her family make ends meet. Her father died years ago and her district, is a poor one anyway, so Katniss has to apply for food aid from the government. Applying for food aid means putting your name in the lottery an extra time, but winning the lottery is hardly desirable. Every year each district (there are 12) must send two lottery winners (one male, one female) to the Capitol (a city in the Rocky Mountains where all the citizens live lives of luxury at the expense of the districts) to compete in the Hunger Games. The Hunger games are plain and simple a televised fight to the death. Twenty-four teenagers are placed in a vast wilderness arena with weapons and minimal supplies and left to fight it out over the course of a couple weeks. The winner goes on to live in luxury; the losers, well- they're already dead. And guess what? Katniss just won the lottery.

This book was an instant favorite. Katniss is a compelling female protaganist and the action and survival sequences, which dominate this book, were well written and exciting. The book can be gut-wrenchingly violent at times, but it's no worse than what you'll find on television or the news for that matter. The world is well-crafted and Collins gives just enough information to keep the story engaging, but never so much as to bog down the plot. My one (and only) complaint about this book was that while it could have been an excellent stand alone work, Collins has decided to make it into a trilogy. I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt the second book will be able to live up to the first.

Give this book to fans of Reality-TV, survial stories and action addicts grades 5+