Antonia Bernardin

After seeing the new film The Ballad of Song Bird and Snakes, I decided to re-listen to the Hunger Games Series.

I listened to the original recordings of the books with Tatiana Maslany as the narrator on Scribd. (If you want to give Scribd a go, use this link to get two months free trial and I’ll get a month free if you choose to carry on!)

I’m not going to summarise the series because they’ve been out forever and you’ve got to know vaguely what they are about. I just thought I’d talk about the things I noticed on a re-read.

1. Katniss has both a dryer sense of humour than the films and is a lot less likeable, but you understand more about how this girl accidentally incites a rebellion with her innate ability to lead.
   
2. Peter is so much funnier and more interesting than film Peter.
   
3. Gail is violent and angry from the start, it isn’t out of character for him to design bombs, like the one that supposedly kills Prim. He is meant to be a mirror for who Katniss could have become because they both lost their fathers and had to support their families. The difference being that Katniss went into the Games and saw how horrific death is, no matter who is dying.
   
4. Prim was always going to die, you can just tell and it makes the whole thing so tragic, the only reason Katniss puts herself through all of it and chooses to survive it is for Prim and Prim ends up dying anyway.
   
5. Suzanne Collins wrote these books to explore Just War theory and now I know this, it’s so interesting to see how she displays the propaganda of the capital, the pageantry of the games and how they are used to control the Districts but also, how they are used to control Capital citizens too.
   
6. The parallels between Katniss and Lucy Grey are so interesting and clever! It throws a lot of Snow’s behaviour towards Katniss in a new light and helps us see how he understands the capital’s downfall can be started by ‘the boy with the bread’ and ‘the girl with a handful of berries’. Also, it helps us understand how he is the architect of his own downfall in the end.
   
7. These books are so much sadder and bleaker than I remember from the first time I read them but I also don’t think I appreciated just how clever they are the first time around.
   
8. I miss dystopian and fantasy books like this, they are incredibly short books for how much they pack in and the pace is so good. I think if these were released now they’d try to force them to be longer books or drag them out over more books in the series.