Okay, I know I run the risk of triggering some fangirl rage by saying this, but I've read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and I think I'm going to skip the movie. And books 2 and 3. Please allow me to explain before you begin hurling shurikens and high heels.
I was not terribly impressed with the book. Unlike many others, I don't really have issues with its lack of originality; I think if your work is executed well enough, you can get past a lack of new ideas (or even a wholesale theft; sometimes this book feels like a literary pantry raid), and it's not like there are a ton of shiny unused concepts floating around anyway. But I don't think it was very well-executed. Don't get me wrong; it wasn't BAD either. Certainly not Twilight bad. It was... okay.
It had some serious issues. Some were little things; for example, I thought that Collins took a swing for an emotional punch in the first few pages that she had not yet earned, her character names are just downright bad (Peeta? REALLY?), some of the elements leaning to sci-fi were ill-thought-out and obnoxious (all of the 'muttations'; not to mention the word 'muttation' itself, which makes me want to punch something whenever I see it), I feel that present-tense narration in the first person across an entire book is tiresome and borders on pretense, naming the nation Panem (as in panem et circenses) seemed a little precious to me, and I think that if you wanted to overanalyze a little bit, Panem would not have survived this long in the geopolitical climate and probably would have been attacked and subsumed for its obvious weakness and mishandling of resources). But others were big, gaping problems in the narrative.
The writing is simple and straightforward. I won't call it clean and economical, because that's not how it feels. It feels clipped, lacking finesse, heavily burdened with huge blocks of exposition that aren't layered in smoothly.
The lead character. Katniss Everdeen is an incredibly awful protagonist. While the overall book is not, as I said previously, Twilight bad, Katniss is Bella bad. Not in the same way; she's not the anti-feminist trainwreck that Bella was, and she's at least independent (though she spends most of the book being manipulated by anyone and everyone) and has a marginally more defined personality than Bella. However, her primary character flaw is that she is completely emotionally blank. And it's not just her. Every single character in the book is free of emotion. You can tell yourself that that's supposed to indicate how broken down these people are or something to that effect, but it doesn't hold water. No one is ever particularly distressed about ANYTHING that is going on. They're all bizarrely stoic about it, even disconnected. These children have been plucked from their homes and forced to murder one another, and they just do so. There's a huge missed opportunity here. What could be an interesting study of human fear, obligation, and horror is instead a strangely empty vessel. Spread across all of these characters like this, it becomes a flaw in the writer rather than the characters. Collins needs to learn how to write people, because none of these ones feel real. However, this one common flaw is not the only one Katniss is saddled with. She's also hopelessly un-empathetic and incapable of relating to people, which makes her unendingly aggravating to read about as our POV character.
Character flaws should make a character more interesting (and are, in fact, among the most important elements of a strong, well-rounded character), but Kat's only make her frustrating.
She's also never given any real conflict outside of the love triangle subplot, which is so deeply contrived and irritating that I couldn't bring myself to engage in any part of it. She's a plot passenger; a character who remains largely passive throughout the storyline. Some would say this is how her struggle to survive is portrayed, but it's uninteresting from a narrative standpoint. I would find her more interesting if she was more proactive in some way. Give her shades of grey by making her act pre-emptively rather than taking the easy way out by never allowing her to kill anyone except in self-defense. Present her with the moral dilemma of necessity vs. atrocity, and don't let her take any obvious choices.
The plot is slack and predictable, and since we've already established that the characters aren't strong enough to support the plot, the whole thing falls down. The only thing that keeps you reading is that the book reads easily even if it doesn't involve you.
Structurally, the book feels awkward. It's clearly the first of a series, and it makes the mistake of not being partially self-contained. Most plot points receive no resolution. Some are introduced that will obviously have consequences later, but don't even have any grounding in the story here in this volume. The flow of the story is a little uneven, though it's not as bad as it could be. There's no sense of a chapter closing; instead it feels like a book abruptly halting mid-paragraph, and it didn't make me care enough about what happens to bother reading the rest.
The story as a piece feels... bloodless. There is no energy to the proceedings at all. Even the supposedly brutal violence that has made the book controversial is sterile and dull. How has this book been banned? It's so SAFE. No risks are taken.
And it's funny to me how a plot that many have compared to modern-day reality TV taken to its logical extremes is so eager to be what it could easily be critical of. The reader becomes just one more viewer watching the Hunger Games on TV. It's voyeuristic, bland, and feels hastily cobbled together, just like so much reality programming. Rather than choosing to reflect in an interesting manner on its subject, it simply emulates it. There's an opportunity here to try to make the reader feel uncomfortable with their 'participation', but it's summarily ignored. Collins wouldn't need to moralize, but the book would be much better if she'd at least given us something to think about.
I feel that most highly popular fiction I've read that gets tagged with the vague and dubious descriptor 'YA' has been underwhelming despite huge success. The Harry Potter series is another example. Once again, I don't hate it, but I do find it frustratingly mediocre. It's been an incredible cultural phenomenon, but it's genuinely nothing special. J.K. Rowling is good at worldbuilding and tone, but her characters are flat and excessively archetypical. For a series structured as a bildungsroman, it's very strange to reach the end and find the protagonist unchanged. Harry is EXACTLY the same character at the end of the series as he was when it began. He's static, and that's irritating. Even the more likable characters are, for the most part, arc-free. I feel like the series should have been about Neville instead.
But where Harry Potter felt like a slightly unfinished painting still lacking fine details on a taut, textured canvas, The Hunger Games feels rather like the kind of crayon scribbling you'd tell your child was very good because you love them. It's clumsy and the strokes are broad.
