Spoiler alert.
I'm pretty sure the series was targeted at an age group below mine (though since I've bought the books I've heard an astonishing number of people my age and older comment on the awesomeness of the series while I am trying to read them in any given public place).
Major spoiler alert.
The Hunger Games trilogy was okay... Except for a few things. Problem A) A "city" of 8,000 people cannot supply enough coal to power a city of tens of millions let alone factories in the other eleven districts. Especially since only maybe 5,500 of them are dedicated coal miners. On that same note, a population of 100,000 +, no matter how efficiently exploited, cannot support a non-laboring population well over several thousand times its size. Logistically it just cannot be done. I mean an economy with an unemployment rate that's over thirty percent just inevitably collapses. Now imagine an unemployment rate of 97% where the 97% unemployed live lavish lifestyles. Does this take much away from the awesomeness of the plot? No, of course not. Was it significant enough to bug me throughout the entire trilogy from chapter one book one? Yes. I can overlook creative license, but not logistical impossibility.
Problem B) Vagueness. Honestly I have no idea how big D12 is. I know, more or less, that somewhere some part of it resides in Appalachia. But the author switches back and forth from having district twelve being a village to having district twelve cover half the southwest. When I read it, things like that and the last problem just don't slide and, although the plot is unharmed, they keep nagging at me in the back of the brain and ultimately take away from my reading experience. Another example of vagueness, which I hesitate to pin on the author as intentional simply because of how unoriginal and crass an idea it is, was my total unawareness of the gender of the main character in the entire first chapter. The main character hunts with a man and no mention is made of any gender, crucify me for assuming both of them are male. To top it off, the main character's name is gender neutral. In the second chapter when I read that the main character is a girl when her name is drawn I distinctly remember saying to myself aloud "Well, that's new." The author surprised me, congratulations. Woop-de-doo. There's a fine line between a book with a twist and turn here and there and a movie directed by M. Night Shyamalon. Nay, it is a rail-road track sized line and yet the author manages to leap across it. I expect aliens to land and overthrow the Capitol until they learn that the aliens can be defeated with water.
Problem C) Repetition. A lot of motifs (which yes, are indeed all about repetition) as well as settings, events, and even narrative phrases were repeated heavily. The figures of speech were what miffed me the most. Reading "I had to be on guard for..." and then just a page later reading "He knew that he had to be on guard for..." and yet another page reading "I thought to myself I had to be on guard for..." just gets plain annoying. And taking almost entire paragraphs and practically copying and pasting them from the first book into the second demonstrates laziness. I know that some people need to be caught up on the plot after a break between books, but that's just not cool. Also a lot of settings were repeated. The entire "torn between two boys" thing gets old after a book and a half of milking it. Yes, okay, we know that you have been friends with the one guy since forever and the other guy saved your life and blah blah blahbity blah. My respect for the protagonist as a huntress slowly declines as I realize she is afflicted with the petty school-girl emotions of the author.
Problem D) Characters. I didn't like any of the characters. Peeta came off as abhorrently forgettable. Gale came off as a typical brother-like character but nothing more. I cared so little about the characters that the protagonist was in love with that I cared more about their emotions regarding her than hers regarding them. And this is even after reading at least a hundred pages of empty, whiny bullcrap about her torn feelings whereupon I know far MORE about her feelings than theirs.
Problem E) Technology. This part of the book makes the least sense. It honestly just left me baffled. How in a post-apocalyptic society, with a relatively small and uneducated population, could they achieve such advances? Especially at a time where technology isn't high on many peoples' lists and a doctor is a rare sight. The total population is like forty mil. Most of that is the Capitolians. And they do not do ANYTHING. They are lazy and unproductive. I cannot see their population making strides in research. First of all there's not many of them. Even in our population a very small percentage of us become scientists and engineers and, frankly, technological progress is quite proportional to their numbers. In the unproductive Capitol I assume an even smaller percentage of an even smaller, less productive population than ours become engineers and scientists. And yet they are lightyears ahead of us. And even if this IS true, then why do they still use coal?! They have incredibly advanced hovercraft that appear to have teleportation abilities. Are you telling me they could not collect oil and natural gas or, god forbid, Uranium and Plutonium?! Solar panels? Hydro-electric? Wind energy? None of these are present yet all would be efficient and viable for such a small, advanced society. What's more it would almost eliminate their dependence on district twelve for a power source, which in fact becomes a major issue in the series.
Am I being too nitpicky? These things just really pissed me off... especially the technological and logistical aspects which were just so completely and utterly ridiculous that at some points I could not take the works seriously.
