Hungry for more!

This week, I am reading the Hunger Games. Almost everyone I know who read it recommends it, and I can see why. I've only had the book for about three days, and I'm almost done with it. The oppressive laws in Panem remind me of the American Revolution, only this is more of an alternate universe where the colonists didn't win their Independence, and ended up stuck with even more oppressive laws. If you get caught for stealing anything, even if you're a three-year-old who just stole something like a piece of candy, you could end up getting whipped or even killed without having so much as a trial to plead your case. If you can't work or get enough money to feed yourself, you either break the law and harvest food from the meadow or the woods, or starve to death. When I read that District 12, the poorest district, was in Appalachia, I realized that in the hundreds of years in the future that this book takes place in, not much has changed. Jobs are still scarce, hunger still rampent, only here, food stamps and wellfare aren't here as a safety line. Also, the fact that 24 teenagers are forced to kill each other, causing needless casualties and grief, just as a way for the Capitol to assert its superiority is pretty harsh too. Whoever came up with that idea must have no conscience whatsoever. They killed a boy who obviously had a serious mental disorder when he stole a pair of night-glasses. In today's society, someone like that would be given help. Having to either lose your life or your humanity-or both- just to amuse a bunch of rich hypocrites shows how ruthless these leaders are. I know that our world today has plenty of unfairness and cruelty in it. I just hope that the real world doesn't end up like this. This is definately a great book, with just the right balance of action, romance and suspense. However, it is also pretty violent and in some parts very sad, so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone under ten or eleven years old.