The Many Faces of Katniss Everdeen

This is an excellent book focused on the major heroine of the series. It does start off, though, with other things like The Hunger Games was #3 on the top 10 banned books in 2012 which is not at all surprising.

You have a series that shows how corrupt a government can be (which is something we still see today), how much power rich people have over poor people (again, continuing today), and how a woman is expected not to be equal to a man (Katniss has to play the part of the girl who doesn't anything for her guy.)

The book has been accused of being sexually explicit (kissing is explicit?) and a mix of satanic and occult.

The author points out historical writings and how they are used in The Hunger Games including material from Shakespeare and Roman writers.

She notes that 'war is the ultimate evil' and 'hunger is not a game,' two really major points that people still don't get. She adds 'the death of innocents is the worst crime of all.' Do argument there. (I'd cite school shootings in particular here. Looking online I found there were 163 school shootings in the 70's and 426 in the years 2000 to 2019. In my own opinion that should fall under the 'crimes against humanity' topic.)

She compares how the United States is similar to the Capitol in the series and how the Capitol is similar to District 13. She also notes that we are becoming more and more like Panem. This refers to things like starving children, governments at different levels spying on people and attempts to rewrite history.

She says Katniss' power comes from her compassion.

She talks about Katniss as the 'classical warrior' and covers various women warriors in history and fiction such as Joan of Arc and Xena. She discusses Roman historicans, Spartacus and his slave revolt, how the games were used to control the Districts, Katniss as a protector of children (how could anyone not be affected at the death of Rue and Prim?) and the power of story and song.

She covers Katniss as a teen soldier and how the districts did have a division between the relatively rich and the straight-out poor. She discusses the story of Theseus and how that relates to the series and how Katniss is 'the chosen one' which is something we've seen in Buffy, for example.

She points out there was some people who did not like the fact that there were Blacks in the movie.

There's also sections on works cited and other topics.

It's also quite interesting that this book was done before Catching Fire was out as a book, much less that what came after that.

I consider this is a must book.

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