Hunger Games 1 – The Hunger Games

Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games is a gripping survival story for 11 year olds about a girl who steps forward so her little sister doesn't have to.

What happens

Katniss Everdeen is sixteen and lives in District 12, where the coal dust never washes off and hunger is normal. She slips under the fence every morning to hunt in the woods with her friend Gale. It's illegal, but it's also how both families eat.

Once a year the Capitol holds the reaping. Every district has to hand over a girl and a boy to fight in an arena until only one is left alive, and the whole country has to watch. Katniss's name is in the draw twenty times, because she's swapped extra entries for grain to keep everyone fed.

Her sister Prim is twelve and her name is in once. You can probably guess whose name gets read out.

What makes it so hard to put down is being right inside Katniss's head. She's prickly and proud and very practical. She won't cry in front of the cameras because it'll make her look weak (and she's already thinking like that on day one). Then a memory of a boy throwing her burnt bread in the rain tells you there's a lot more going on underneath.

It's told in the present tense, so everything happens as you read it. The reaping chapter is one of those openings you don't forget.

The content needs saying plainly. This is a book about children being made to kill each other for television, and the story is heading straight for that arena. Katniss's father was killed in a mine explosion before the book begins, people starve to death in the streets of her district, and a boy gets beaten for helping her. Before she's even left home, she's weighing up who might kill whom.

That puts it at the very top of our shelf, or beyond it for some readers. For a sensitive eleven-year-old it could be a lot, and it's well worth a parent reading the first few chapters too. But if your reader is ready for something darker, and loves a heroine with grit and a sharp eye for unfairness, this one's hard to beat.

What to read next

If they're hooked, the story carries on in Catching Fire, the second book.