Amazon kept pushing The Hunger Games at me, and so I finally broke down and got a copy of Suzanne Collins’ book. I suppose most everybody but me already knows about it, but here’s the basic premise.

We have a post-apocalyptic society in North America. There are thirteen places where people live: the twelve districts, which produce goods, and the Capital, which consumes them. At some point in the past there were thirteen districts, but the districts rebelled against the Capital, and were put down. District Thirteen was completely destroyed. And to punish Districts One through Twelve, the poorly-named Hunger Games were devised.

Every year, each district must provide two “tributes”, one boy and one girl, to participate in the Games. The Games are a test of survival and blood-thirstiness: twenty-four lads and lasses go in, and only one comes out. The tributes must find food and water, defend themselves against their fellows, and ultimately kill the other survivors in order to win. Our heroine, Katniss, is one of the tributes for District Twelve, a poor district whose tributes almost never win.

Now, the first thing to say about this milieu is that it’s looney tunes. It’s never explained why the Districts put up with the Games or with the drones in the Capital, and since all of the raw materials and food come from the Districts (so far as we can tell), it would seem like starving them out would be fairly easy. Now, the Capital does have access to high technology the districts don’t have, including a variety of flying “hovercraft”, but how they that maintain that technological base given the low population of Panem is unclear.

In short, I didn’t believe in the world for a minute.

That said, Katniss is an engaging heroine. She’s a survivor, and a thinker; she’s got trust issues; and if she’s touchy and inarticulate, she’s also loyal and well able to find food in the wilderness. She’s not been trained to play the Hunger Games, as some of the kids in the wealthier districts are, but her life to date amounts to the same thing. The course of the games is well told. There’s a romance of sorts (and Collins seems to understand teen emotions fairly well), and adventure, sacrifice and heroism. I was especially impressed with Katniss’ relationship with Peeta, her fellow District Twelve tribute. I can’t go into details without spoilers; suffice it to say that Katniss is thrust into an equivocal position, and the confusion in her mind and feelings is handled rather well.

The games are a tad harrowing but not too bad (Collins isn’t Stephen King). The book has a solid conclusion while still leaving the reader wanting more, and there are some obvious threads to be explored in the subsequent books.

So, all in all, not bad. I’ve got the second book, which I plan to read in the near term, and unless I really dislike it I’ll read the third as well, and we’ll see if Collins can stick the dismount.