I’m giving away 3 copies of Hunger Games–check out this post for rules & to enter!

Synopsis:
After winning the Hunger Games, underdog Katniss Everdeen finds herself caught up in political intrigue as rebellion foments in other districts, and when the president himself makes a game-changing move, Katniss must choose between love and freedom.

Review:
I was totally and completely sucked in and swept away by Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins’s sequel to last year’s it novel Hunger Games. The series is starting to remind me a bit of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series, both in terms of the themes it addresses (the sicknesses of the media age), and the sheer addictive power of the action-packed narrative.

I don’t like to read reviews before I’ve read a book, but I ended up reading the review in Entertainment Weekly. I couldn’t disagree more, and feel like the reviewer did the series a real disservice by comparing it with Twilight–as if that book is the standard by which all YA books should be judged. Just because the reviewer is writing for a mass audience doesn’t mean she has to pander and pretend like YA is this monolithic entity of similar books. YA has genres, too. Twilight is a romance (and a badly written one at that), and the Hunger Games books are action-fantasy. Different genres, different audiences, different reviewing criteria. Very lazy work on the reviewer’s part.

Anyway, I was thrilled with the plot twists that Collins came up with for this middle book. Some of them I should’ve seen coming, but when I’m caught up in a book I tend not to try to predict what’s happening next. I love to lose myself like that in a story–it’s what I’m always hoping for when I pick up a book.