The Hunger Games. This book really blew me away. I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did, I initially read it only because a friend lent it to me via Nook. I thought it was so cool that I could sit here in Buffalo reading a book sent to me by a friend in Utah. But I digress.  (Which would probably be the perfect tattoo for me if I was so inclined. Or maybe “Surely, you can’t be serious.” in French.) Sûrement, vous ne pouvez pas être sérieux.

The Hunger Games is a post-apocalyptic, dystopian, young adult novel. It is one of a trilogy about Katniss Everdeen, a teenager who keeps her family and much of her coal mining town from the brink of starvation by hunting illegally in the surrounding woods. She is fiercely loyal to her family and her close friend Gale and it is in protecting them that she is plucked from obscurity and plunged into The Hunger Games, an annual reality show gone awry. The games were created to emphasize the futility of rebelling against the totalitarian government which keeps it’s citizens firmly under it’s thumb.

Kat’s struggle between her fierce independence and her need to “go along to get along” to keep her family safe and survive the games is the core of the novel. I gasped aloud at parts of the book and cried at others. I strongly recommend this book and I am powering through the next in the trilogy.