I am about a chapter and a half in and so far the book is a far cry from the "mature" and "perfectly paced" (sorry John Green) book I'd been promised, I have found myself reading, well, a young-adult fantasy book. Harry Potter defies this conventional genre classification somehow--it's a somewhat indescribable quality of JK Rowling's writing that, aside from being enthralling and compelling, the books are, quite simply, literature.
Not so with Suzanne Collins. The main ideas of the book are intriguing and very salient in this age of reality television and, let's face it, terrible economy. The whole idea of the Hunger Games, while far-fetched, is interesting enough to merit my continued reading. But so far, the writing is just not there. For one thing, Collins makes use of the first-person present-tense, which can sometimes come off gimmick-y, as it does in this book.
Mostly, though, it is the colossal info-dump that Collins deploys throughout the first two chapters that has really turned me off. I am bored and frustrated with the constant asides about everything from why the main character is nick-named Catnip (some inane story about being misheard and followed around by a bobcat) to the rules of the reaping ceremony that takes place in the first chapter.
It's not that these details themselves are boring. Some of them are actually quite crucial to the story. But due to the first-person narration, Collins can get away with using cheap info-dumps instead of letting the information come out organically, or even--gasp!--letting us figure it out for ourselves. That seems a concept which is particularly lost on Collins, because so far everything from the purpose of The Hunger Games to Katniss's feelings about her family has been way over-explained.
Here's a good example of that -- a scene where our main character Katniss is thinking about her younger sister, Prim, who is having her name put into the drawing for the Hugner Games for the first time (tesserae, as it was explained like six times, is food and oil you get in exchange for entering your name in the drawing more than the required number of times).
I hug her, because I know these next few hours will be terrible for her. Her first reaping. She's about as safe as you can get, since she's only entered once. I wouldn't let her take out any tesserae. But she's worried about me. That the unthinkable might happen.
Okay, how much of this paragraph do we really need? The first sentence, sure, that's fine. The second? Okay, a fragment for dramatic value. But the part about her being safe, well, if you'd read the long exposition on how the reaping works, you definitely already know this. The part about not letting her take out any tesserae? Definitely cut that. We already know how much Katniss cares about her sister (since it's been explained to us like ten times), I would guess this by myself. Or even a sentence about how Katniss took out extra tesserae, without saying that it was in place of her sister would be better. As for Prim being worried, I'd much rather see that in her actions that have Katniss tell me. After all, how does she know?
Another example of too much telling over showing, which occurs after Katniss volunteers to take her younger sister's place in the Hunger Games:
At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to me. It is an old and rarely used gesture of our district, occasionally seen at funerals. It means thanks, it means admiration, it means goodbye to someone you love.
How much more emotionally effective would that part have been if we already knew the meaning and context of that gesture? If, for instance, we had seen someone perform it at a funeral, or a ceremony honoring a district hero. Katniss's father, as it was explained a few times, died tragically in a coal mine and was given a posthumous medal of valor. Why couldn't Suzanne Collins show us this funeral/ceremony and explain the gesture in that context? It would have made the above scene much more moving.
There are tons of other examples of this clunky, over-telling type of writing. This is the type of writing I expect to see in mediocre young-adult books. I was told this book was something a bit different, but so far I feel too much like I'm reading a kids book. I never feel that way when reading Harry Potter. JK Rowling assumes her readers can figure certain things out on their own instead of spelling them out to us as if we were idiots (or, you know, children). That is the difference between crappy teen books and real literature.
I am going to continue reading this book to see if it will improve. I hope that now that we know the general workings of the world these characters inhabit, we'll get more action and less info-dump. We'll see.
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