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"  SPOILER ALERT! If you haven&amp;#039;t read the first two Hunger Games books, go read them now before you read this. They&amp;#039;re awesome. It won&amp;#039;t take long. Promise. For the rest of you, a recap: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins introduces Katniss Everdeen, a girl living in a North America hundreds of years in the future. Our lovely civilization has apparently crumbled and been replaced by Panem, a nation of twelve districts run by the Capitol. Uprising against the Capitol will result in your complete annihilation-that&amp;#039;s what happened to District Thirteen, anyway. As punishment for that attempted rebellion, the Capitol holds The Hunger Games, an annual reality television show. Each district selects one boy and one girl by lottery, and the &amp;quot;tributes&amp;quot; are confined to an arena where they are forced to fight to the death. Katniss&amp;#039;s kid sister&amp;#039;s name is drawn in the District Twelve lottery, so Katniss volunteers to take her place knowing she&amp;#039;s basically signing up to be killed. After all, the impoverished District Twelve hasn&amp;#039;t produced a winner in at least thirty years. To make things even more complicated, Katniss has feelings for her childhood best friend Gale and her fellow District Twelve tribute, Peeta. If you don&amp;#039;t have a problem with goofy names (let&amp;#039;s be serious, it&amp;#039;s not like &amp;quot;Hermione&amp;quot; is a home run either) then Katniss Everdeen is the heroine for you. Besides displaying your classic to-the-rescue traits - smart, brave, resourceful - Katniss also finds herself in the tricky spot of being totally in control of whether she lives or dies while having virtually no control over what will happen to her if she manages to survive. And as love triangles go, the best friend from home versus exciting new guy from your exciting new life isn&amp;#039;t the most revolutionary idea in the history of books, but Collins&amp;#039; guys are at least equally deserving of Katniss&amp;#039; affection, just for totally different reasons. In Catching Fire, Katniss realizes that her actions in the arena inadvertently sparked a revolution. Rather than let Peeta and Katniss get away with (not) murder, the Capitol throws a very special Hunger Games: one whose contestants are all previous victors. While Katniss had no initial intention of being the rebel rebel to inspire Panem, she becomes the threat the Capitol wants to crush. It&amp;#039;s too late to go back; she and Peeta team up with the other victors and put on a show like nothing Panem has ever seen. The third installment Mockingjay  picks up immediately after the end of Catching Fire, in the rumored to be non-existent District Thirteen and it&amp;#039;s spooky-efficient 1984-like underground cityscape. Unlike the first two books which center around life in the arena, Mockingjay does away with the pretense of a finite problem altogether. It&amp;#039;s not just about making it through the Games so everything will be okay; Katniss is in a fight for the entirety of Panem (not to mention, of course, the ongoing struggle of Gale vs. Peeta). It&amp;#039;s tough to raise the stakes when your original premise involves the brutal murder of twenty-three teenagers, but Collins manages to create a bigger and more terrifying enemy for the last time out. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/a12282/the-hunger-games-review/>