Eh, Hunger Games books were okay, I don’t think I’d consider them “incredible literature.” They did all the “sorted into groups, based on, illegal to” stuff, too, they just did it first second, after Harry Potter.

Hunger Games is a lame Battle Royale knock off

Ursula Le Guin of Earthsea fame put it nicely:

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life- of a sort, for a while.

I’ll offer a dissenting. I did not think the Hunger Games were good by any metric. I read all three in a four day period. They have the substance of popcorn, and popcorn is delicious. But they are a tiny fraction of what good YA fiction can be. I hold for comparison: The Hobbit, Earthsea, and His Dark Materials – and there are many others – that will stand the test of time while the Hunger Games is a footnote about a fad.

It was also a full on reskin of an existing book that had a far superior story (Battle Royale). Though tbf, HG did significantly improve the political message BR was going for.

What is YA?