....Utter crap. Superbly crap-tastic. Quite possibly one of the worst decisions of my life.
The preceding are things that one can associate with partying with the phantom last name, and his associate the super dervaish. The same feelings and thoughts can be said for the The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.
I just wanted to see what the hype was; lo and behold, there wasn't any. It will be a better movie than it was a book though. Actually, had it been only a movie (I don't plan on watching the movie; so this is just my conjecture), it would have been decent. I should mention that Stephen King gave the book a "B." But I feel like a Stephen King "A" is what you want, not the B.
So why do I think this book sucks? To be honest, the book starts off pretty well; however, slightly before even halfway through, it starts to become more and more uninteresting. The descriptions (scenery/surroundings) are fairly well done and the narrative isn't too shabby either, but the author consistently fails to give life to the action. Unfortunately, action (not only the fights but the transitions as well), had they been well done would have significantly improved this book in my eyes. Instead, it's like these crappy blog entries I write, except worth much more. (Honestly, it's the movie more so that's going to give her bank, or so I'd think.) I realize that it's not an easy thing to do. That's as far as my sympathies go though.
That was pretty cold? Unfortunately, this train wreck continues (the book or this entry?!?!?)
Next are the characters and their interactions -- cookie-cutter characters and unbelievable (not in a good way folks) interactions. I could care less who dies and who lives. More importantly, the characters that did die evoked no emotional response.
Moving along, this brings us to deaths. The good news is like one would expect in a death-match, there's a lot of deaths. The bad news is they're rushed, the scenes are too short to illicit any response (be it satisfaction, horror) from the reader. Only thought that went through my mind was, "that's it?" Make me hate the killer,
My view of the vocabulary and sentence structure is that both are so-so. I didn't have to bust open a dictionary every page, but it might have been good if I had been forced to once in a while (hint, hint). The sentence length more or less seemed to be stay the same. I don't think that really helps to set up the desired mood. It should do pretty good as a movie though. A lot of the weak-points of the novel will be covered up when it's on the big screen.
Lastly, when I went through some reviews before writing this up, I stumbled across the fact that apparently there's a Japanese manga entitled "Battle Royale" and guess what it's about? It's an eerily similar (but apparently much better) plot and story, that was first published in 1999 (2003 in the good 'ole US of A). Maybe I'll read that instead when I learn to travel back in time.
Also, this is a chick novel?!?!?!? Egads! What the hell do you peeps read?!? (In other words, what the hell did I just read.)
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