Book Review: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

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Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I rarely, if ever, read a complete series of books. Perhaps it is the fact that I have a short attention span and a run of books on the same topic can't keep me entertained. Or maybe it is that the second book usually ends up being a disappointment. In the case of Catching Fire, the problem was the latter.

As much as I don't like to join the bandwagon of teens who carried the first book to massive success, I actually loved The Hunger Games in both of its forms - as a book first and later in the movie. It captured an exciting dystopian society and didn't dumb down the writing so much that I lost interest. Even the obnoxious teen romance was palatable because the rest of the story took the forefront. I was excited to check out the Catching Fire after everyone promised me it was even better than the first and I would go batty over it.

The problem is that everything I didn't like about The Hunger Games, was amplified times ten in Catching Fire. The teen love triangle took up almost the entire first half of the book, even when the story was trying to build up to something interesting. My wife kept telling me that "it gets better", and indeed it did... but it became a case of too-little-too-late. Sure, the hunger games portion was fun but it was less than half the book and truthfully wasn't that different from the first book. I can't imagine why people thought this one was great. The excitement that I had for the story was lost in Katniss' blubbering about Gale and Peeta. Barf, Barf, Barf.

No doubt I will continue to watch the movies because they only take up 2 hours of my time but I can almost guarantee that another round of the Hunger Games book series will not be in my future.

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