Here’s an excerpt from a thorough, excellent review of Gary Ross’s The Hunger Games by Roderick Heath:
“If I’m sounding a little jaded about Collins’ creation, which I enjoyed reading, it’s because the more I thought about The Hunger Games, the less and less satisfied I was. It’s a novel that carefully sets up a situation that is, by definition, a zone of moral nullification, and yet contrives to have our heroine emerge smelling like a rose without ever having to make a genuinely hard choice, in a tale that counts finally as neither effectively elemental nor symbolically rich, but rather as efficiently marketable…. Katniss remains such a clean-cut moral avatar for her audience, in high contrast to a hellish scenario, that its starts to feel somehow dishonest.”
Also, in case you missed it, here is my conversation with Hannah Faith Notess, poet and editor of Jesus Girls, about the book.