An author I wanted to highlight is Suzanne Collins. Collins is a great writer who has written over 12 books. Her most popular series is The Hunger Games book series. After the popularity of the movie The Hunger Games, it was nominated for best song in Visual Media and won a Grammy on February 10, 2013.
With the newest book in The Hunger Games series, A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, having come out in May of 2019, there was bound to be a movie adaption like the rest of the series. The movie adaptation came out on November 17, 2023. Fans of the series highly anticipated it and were very excited about the release. The book is set to take place 64 years in the past where we delve deeper into President Snow’s backstory, a turning point for the Hunger Games, and the origins of the hanging tree song.
Moving onto reviews, Katie Walsha is a Los Angeles-based film critic for the Tribune News Service, Los Angeles Times, and The Playlist. A quote from her review, “After we’ve watched an entire bloody Hunger Games unfold, the audience then has to follow Coriolanus to District 12 where he’s been banished to work as a Peacekeeper. Then we have to witness his turn from lovesick young man to right-wing Panem fascist. The character beats simply don’t track, and it’s exhausting to even try to follow them.” While I think her take on things is quite harsh, she has a point. The first 95 minutes are great, but the latter half of the movie just sort of dragged things on. They should’ve ended up dividing those two parts of the movie into their own separate thing.
Finally, if you are looking for books that resemble The Hunger Games in style and story I’d recommend the Darkest Minds series by Alexandra Bracken and The Red Queen series by Victoria Aveuard. Both series are of the Dystopian genre, The Red Queen series is for those people who really like fantasy fiction novels and The Darkest Minds series is for those who like that rustic, dystopian, sci-fi feel. Some other Dystopian books that are popular this time of year that I haven’t read include The Handmaid’s Tale and A Wrinkle in Time. I have, though, watched A Wrinkle in Time and was very intrigued by it, so I may cover it next month. Something that I haven’t watched, but have heard phenomenal things about was A Handmaid’s Tale, you can watch it on HULU, Disney+, and ESPN+.
