The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll briefly compare The Hunger Games series (which I liked) to the Twilight series (which I didn't like, and only read the first one and three-quarters books because my daughters wanted to read them so I wanted to see what they were like). Twilight has a lot of negative "emotional baggage" issues wrapped up in it (would you really want your daughter to emulate the main female character??), and the quality of the writing was disappointing. The main female character in the Hunger Games felt far less dysfunctional to me, although of course the setting is a futuristic nightmare, and she was necessarily dealing with less than desirable circumstances. I found the themes of The Hunger Games more interesting, the characters more whole (yet very human), and the subject matter more appropriate for younger readers than Twilight. It's not that I absolutely loved the books, it's just hard not to compare the two, and to me there's an obvious winner and loser. I just hope the upcoming movies honor and do justice to the books, not exploit them.

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