As Peternelle van Arsdale, author of The Cold Is in Her Bones , a dark fantasy rooted in the Medusa myth, points out, speculative fiction draws on reality, directing our attention to the uncomfortable truths in our surroundings. Characters like Katniss Everdeen show teens they can be heroes, activists, and revolutionaries.
She never emerges unscathed from her battles, but her scars show how that battle was worth fighting. She's an eternal reminder to teenage girls that — if they are angry enough and determined enough — they can break the world around them. Johnson agrees about the impact of promoting emotional, as well as physical, muscle.
Madeleine Deliee writes, teaches, and parents in the Washington, D. She sometimes tweets about mostly geeky stuff at MMDeliee. Change Makers. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Gabe Ginsberg Getty Images. In these hunger games, it's not enough to be deadly with a bow and arrow; to survive, Katniss must seduce viewers into sending her food and medicine. In a video interview made for her publisher, Scholastic, Collins says that the idea came to her when she was channel-surfing one night in bed.
But the troubling relationship between war and the media was impressed on her long before that night. Her father spent his career in the US air force and served in Vietnam. The globe-trotting life of an air force family inspired two other preoccupations that would become central to the trilogy — it gave her space to develop a fascination with classical mythology, and it took her to lots of battlefields, ancient and modern, which her historically minded father would explain to his four children in strategic detail.
The idea of a vengeful state that sends young people to be slaughtered came from Theseus and the Minotaur, while the games themselves are modelled on the gladiatorial contests of ancient Rome.
At the heart of the books is the character of Katniss — an action heroine, whose ambivalence about herself and others does not merely decorate the story but drives the plot. It's a trick that is particularly admired by the novelist and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz, whose Alex Rider books have been one of the most successful action series in the UK over the past decade.
He says: "Suzanne Collins has pulled off a remarkable coup, producing a female character that has equal appeal to both boys and girls and it's interesting how the book manages to balance an intricate and detailed love triangle with sequences of fairly gruesome violence. It's not often you find both these things between the covers of the same YA [young adult] book. She's tough without being a tomboy and attractive without being a sophomore although she has elements of both.
Her relationship with Peeta is it love or expediency? Even she is unsure where her feelings truly lie. Though Katniss, who is 16 in the first book, is buffeted by all the familiar teen emotions — the desire to be special competing with a wish to belong — Collins insists the series is not a metaphor for troubled adolescence.
I write about war for adolescents. Increasingly, though, adults are also reading The Hunger Games, which has been energetically marketed to the valuable crossover audience. Her UK publisher, Hilary Murray Hill, dates the tipping point back to , when Collins was named one of Time magazine's most influential people , and Mockingjay, the third volume in the trilogy, was published in both teen and adult editions.
There is a very grown-up political logic to the books, which become steadily more uncomfortable as they go on, ending with an ultra-dystopian society in which the rebels — Katniss among them — resort to the same power games as their one-time oppressors. All very clever and thought-provoking," says Horowitz. The writer Michael Rosen has written admiringly for the Guardian about the politics of Collins' dystopia. I felt I was being warned and I quite like being warned.
Rosen's article on the Guardian's Comment Is Free website struck a geyser of opinion, ranging from those who accused it of political incoherence and wrong-headed moralism, to those who, like a user posting as "psygone", saw the trilogy as a projection of "the subconscious fears of today's teens that their future will be more and more grim, and they will have to do the 'unusual' in order to not be crushed by it".
It would start back with whatever had precipitated the war and moved up through the battlefield you were standing in and through that and after that. It was a very comprehensive tour guide experience. So throughout our lives we basically heard about war. Eventually, Collins and her family ended up in the South, where she graduated high school from the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Collins then enrolled at Indiana University, where she graduated in as a double major in theater and telecommunications.
She then went on to earn a master's degree in dramatic writing from New York University. Following graduate school, Collins moved into television, writing for several children's television programs, including Clarissa Explains It All and Little Bear.
A big fan of her writing, it was Proimos who urged Collins to try writing books. The book tells the tale of a boy and his discovery of a vast new world he discovers when he accidentally falls through the grate of the laundry room in his New York City apartment building.
Gregor received critical success and become a New York Times best seller. While The Underland Chronicles made Collins a well-known author, it was her next series that ratcheted up her celebrity status. As Collins later recalled, The Hunger Games trilogy was born while she was watching television late one night.
Flipping through the channels, Collins was suddenly struck by the lack of distinction between reality TV and coverage of the Iraq war: "We have so much programming coming at us all the time," she says. Are we becoming desensitized to the entire experience? I can't believe a certain amount of that isn't happening.
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