I’m not a teenaged girl (shocking, I know) so there are some cultural phenomenon that escape my attention until they become or prevalent that one is forced to know what they are.
Twilight is a recent example (sparkly vampires and hunky werewolves? Brilliant!). It seems the next Twilight (though I have no idea if anyone is calling it that, other than me) is the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (of which the last book, Mockingjay
, was just released).
Here’s how Scholastic, the publisher of the Hunger Games trilogy (which, I suppose, means I should compare it to Harry Potter) describes the first book in the series (titled The Hunger Games
):
Twenty-four are forced to enter. Only the winner survives.
In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. Each year, the districts are forced by the Capitol to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the Hunger Games, a brutal and terrifying fight to the death – televised for all of Panem to see.
Survival is second nature for sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who struggles to feed her mother and younger sister by secretly hunting and gathering beyond the fences of District 12. When Katniss steps in to take the place of her sister in the Hunger Games, she knows it may be her death sentence. If she is to survive, she must weigh survival against humanity and life against love.
You know what? That actually sounds kind of interesting. Perhaps I’ll try and convince the folk on the Incomparable podcast that we should talk about it in a future episode so I’ll have an excuse to read it.