The Hunger Games

 Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun.....

~Back of Hunger Games book.    

In fourth grade I read the Hunger Games, a fantastically written book by Susanne Collins. That year I had a bad habit of whenever I think a book is boring, I barely pay any attention to it so basically I sort of didn't read the book. I couldn't remember a thing (except for the end). So I decided to reread it this year.

The Hunger Games is about people who live in one big land blob called Panem. Panem is all the land and countries in the world together. The Capitol decides to split all the land up and name them all districts. There are twelve districts total. The first four districts are called "career districts" because they are favored the most by the Capitol. Each district has a specialty like agriculture or coal mining. Well enough about that for now.

The main character of the book is a sixteen year old girl named Katniss Everdeen who lives in district twelve. Her family is very poor and struggles to survive. She has a little sister named Primrose (Prim). Her Dad dies in an explosion in the mines, so they don't have any way to make much money. But they do make little money from Katniss illegally hunting in the woods with her friend Gale. They will shoot an animal with a bow and arrow or trap it with a snare, then go to the market to trade it for something edible or sell it to the butcher.

Every year the capitol holds the Hunger Games. The Reaping help decides who will represent their district in the Games. During the Reaping someone will choose two names out of a giant glass ball. One male. One female. Ages 12-18. They will be your districts tributes. Tributes represent are basically your representatives. You can enter your name more than one time in return for food.

The objective of the Hunger Games is to kill all the other tributes in the arena. In order to return home you have to win. Losing is certain death. All the tributes are left in an arena for a couple weeks and have to survive in the wild without being killed by other tributes. Only one person out of twenty four make it back home. The reason the Capitol does this is to remind everyone who lives in Panem that they have complete control over them. And to do so they take their children and send them away to be killed. Nice, right?

But little did they know that their lives would be changed forever because of the Hunger Games. When Prim's name gets called during the reaping, Katniss steps up and volunteers for tribute, thinking of this being her last goodbye to her family and friends. To Katniss'es disappointment, Peeta Melark, a local baker, was picked for male tribute. Katniss doesn't really like Peeta to much.

So that's my teaser about the Hunger Games. Hope you like it! Watch the movie on March 23, 2012!