Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

[lightreads]

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I’ve been trying to figure out why I think it’s so important that these are young adult books. It started when I realized that the upcoming movies have a problem: a violence problem, and consequently a rating problem. It would be the really unfunny kind of irony to sanitize these stories, all things considered, and how could you, really? But I’m curious to see how the moviemakers deal with the problem of potentially excluding a large chunk of the teen audience with the rating.



(Sidetrack: the rating thing might actually be okay, considering the U.S. movie rating system is far more interested in keeping young people away from sex than violence. Ironey again, and something these books are sideways critical of. Then again, it bugs me a bit that these books are, with only one or two small exceptions, completely void of sexual content. Anyway.)



I realize that a lot of teens and pre-teens are reading these books for the romance, which is hilarious since Katniss herself snaps at one point that she has a rebellion to spark, she doesn’t have time for kissing. And I realize a lot of people are reading to get a hit of the old, easy, satisfying story – young person overcomes miraculous odds to single-handedly destroy oppressive evil. The Star Wars thing, I mean. Which is also funny, because it’s so incredibly not the point.



I realize I’m coming up to the brink of saying, ‘ur reading it wrong.’ I generally don’t care how people read books, what they get out of them. And in this case, I really don’t care. I love that this series is so popular, and I think it is incredibly important that it’s all over the teen market. Because I believe in the power of these stories. As a body, this trilogy is all about stories and how we live in them. It’s about political propaganda, and fearmongering, and packaged love stories, and what it’s like to live inside all these things, sliding in and out of believing them.



And I think that it doesn’t really matter what the thirteen year old girls of the world are reading these books for. They’re still opening the door to these stories, and living in them. There’s so much going on beneath the waterline here – so much wisdom, so much that is sad and awful without ever becoming cold or cynical. These are not books about some impossible kid whose plastic pluckiness saves the world, three cheers for all. They’re books about surviving, and being a tiny piece of a big grinding machine, and playing your turn on the game board as best you can, even when you’re bankrupt. Being used, and making the best of it at least part of the time. Important shit. And I think it’s seeping into the consciousness of a generation of readers in the quiet, plain ways these books work on people.





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