Review: THE HUNGER GAMES (Book 1 of the trilogy) | Suzanne Collins

TITLE: The Hunger Games

AUTHOR: Suzanne Collins

PUBLISHER: Scholastic, Inc.

DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2008

PAGES: 374

GRADE LEVEL(S): 7-8

RELEVANT CURRICULA: English Language Arts

CLASSROOM USES: Class reading, Literature Circles

BRIDGE TEXTS: The Giver, What Is The What?, Fahrenheit 451

NB: This review is based on the text of Book 1 of The Hunger Games Trilogy. Later reviews will cover the remainder of the series.

Adolescence is marked by struggling to find the line between right and wrong, between making choices and following directions. Every day of his life, every middle school students feels that his free will has been undermined, that he has suffered some injustice. It is the condition of being an adolescent.

What student hasn’t felt trapped—either at home, at school, or both? What student hasn’t felt that she has been wrongly vilified due to some arbitrary decision made by an authority figure? What student hasn’t attempted to elude the watchful eye of a parent, teacher, or administrator, hasn’t broken some rule in order to achieve something that she knows just has to be done. And what student hasn’t felt, at one time or another, that she has been pitted against her peers for no good reason? 

The Hunger Games attacks all of these adolescent struggles in a fast-paced story that teaches strong lessons, but never feels didactic.

The story is set in an almost post-Apocalyptic version of North America called Panem, in which the main role of government is to suppress any sort of uprising of the micro-communities under its control. Each “District” is self-contained, except for once a year, when one boy and one girl from each locality are sent to the capital for a televised fight to the death. The “tributes,” as they are called, are to serve as reminders of the complete control that the central government has over its citizens.

Katniss Everdeen—the book’s heroine and narrator—has fought to survive for most of her life, but never on the level that she will when she is sent as a tribute in the Hunger Games. She faces the very same issues that every student faces in their own lives—feeling trapped, victimized, forced to break the rules—but on a scale they can only imagine.

Parents have protested the inclusion of the Hunger Games Trilogy as required reading in their children’s school’s curricula, and there are legitimate questions to be raised about the content. The Hunger Games does not portray adults—particularly those in positions of authority—in a favorable light. Events of the book are sometimes violent, and almost always hard to fathom.

Ultimately, however, The Hunger Games provides teachers and parents to broach difficult issues. Moral issues abound in this novel, but even for those who want schools to avoid as much as possible the teaching of moral issues, this book cannot be ignored. Students will relate to Katniss and her plight, and The Hunger Games is a wonderful tool to get students to think about big questions. Keep it out of schools, and—don’t look now, but—you’ll be putting the same kind of restraints against students and teachers as the rule-makers in Panem’s capital city put on their districts.

Review: LITTLE BROTHER | Cory Doctorow

TITLE: Little Brother
AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
PUBLISHER: Tor (Tom Doherty Associates, LLC)
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2008
PAGES: 365
GRADE LEVEL(S): 9-10
RELEVANT CURRICULA: English, American History, Contemporary Affairs, Ethics
CLASSROOM USES: Required reading, Summer/Independent reading, Literature Circles
BRIDGE TEXTS: 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The 9/11 Commission Report

Why do we ban books in our schools and libraries? To protect our students, right? They are young and impressionable, and we must protect their fragile minds. So we block off books that contain profanity, references to sex, or drugs and alcohol, or subversive ideas.

So, let’s give Little Brother the test. Profanity? Check. Sex, drugs, alcohol? Check, check, check. Subversive ideas? Double check.

Doctorow’s main character and narrator is a 17 year-old high school student with a penchant for using technology to scare up excitement. He starts innocently enough, hacking his school-owned laptop so that he can IM friends during classes or putting rocks in his shoes to fool the gait-recognition technology in the school’s security cameras. When Marcus’s hacking exploits make him a terrorism suspect in the eyes of the Department of Homeland Security, his world changes in nearly every possible way. His friendships are pushed to the limit, he wonders why his parents can’t see his point of view, and he loses faith in his government as an advocate for the innocent and guarantor of freedom.

Most high school students will never be terror suspects, or even much more adept with computers than to load basic software and create powerpoint presentations for class projects. But they can all relate to friendships on the skids, feeling estranged from parents, or worrying that the system has somehow abandoned them. Students will relate to Marcus Yallow’s story.

While students will find an ally in Marcus, teachers will find an excellent vehicle for a variety of lessons and units. Coming of age. Loss of innocence. Personal privacy versus national security. To what extent does the government’s responsibility lie more in protecting its citizens’ constitutional rights, and to what extent are those rights expendable in the interest of public safety?

There is no end to fodder for discussion and debate in this novel; creative teachers will see opportunities for all manner of classroom activities and cross-curricular assignments. But before throwing this book into the syllabus, teachers are going to have to answer questions about the profanity, the sex, drugs, and alcohol, and (perhaps most of all) the subversive ideas. Doctorow’s position in this novel is not, shall we say, “fair and balanced.” Detractors will point to the book’s overt liberalism and anti-government sentiments. Any of these fears can be allayed easily enough with a well-written rationale and some ancillary reading material that presents a more conservative viewpoint.

The alternative is to leave this book out of classrooms and libraries altogether, to add it to another list of banned books. Over the years, we’ve banned William Chaucer, James Joyce, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, and the Bible. Among such company, it could be a real honor for Doctorow were his book to be banned—but to keep this book from kids would be a real miscarriage of justice.

Banned Books

From The Guardian, in honor of Banned Books Week 2010, here the the 10 most-banned books in American schools and libraries. Many of the books that grace this and other banned books lists are wonderful for the classroom, and several from this Top Ten will be reviewed on this site in short order.