The Hunger Games By Suzanne Collins

Could you survive on your own, in the wild, with everyone out to make sure you don't live to see the morning?

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in lineby forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to death on live TV.

What happens if we choose entertainment over humanity? When Katniss is sent to stylists to be made more telegenic before she competes, she stands naked in front of them, strangely unembarrassed. “They're so unlike people that I'm no more self-conscious than if a trio of oddly colored birds were pecking around my feet,” she thinks. In order not to hate these creatures who are sending her to her death, she imagines them as pets. It isn't just the contestants who risk the loss of their humanity. It is all who watch.

Katniss Everdeen is a hard-core teen who has spent years skirting authority by illegally hunting in the woods and taking care of her starving family. Through a series of events, her sister Prim is selected in a random lottery to compete in the hunger games. Of course the brave Katniss steps in to take her place, in a series of gladiator-like-fight-to-the-death-battles. It's a crazy game of survival and blood, where the winner takes all, while thousands of people across the continent watch in sadistic glee.

It's hard to say what is the most compelling thing about the book. The steady, almost cliff-hanger pacing, the romantic subplot, or the spirited Katniss herself. Her indomitable will to survive, even as she grapples with her own feelings of humanity at the loss of human life.