I don’t know what to rave about first - the author or the novel? Marcus Sedgwick is one of the best teen novelists alive today and writes with such detailed suspense that adults should be sorry they are missing out. In Blood Red Snow White he combines history with a spy story and twists it into a tale of love. His narrative is alive with prose and his geography alive with sketches so real, you might as well have been there. In Blood Red he tells the true life story of the author, Arthur Ransome, an English journalist and writer. On assignment in Russia during the time of Lenin, Ransome is asked by the English to spy for his country, which he does. Soon however he is caught between loyalty to England and his heart, which has fallen in love with Russia and one of her fairest. The retelling of this history is so alive that the reader gets a sense of revolution and the harshness of war, without being exposed to the horror. Ransome later becomes one of Britain’s most loved teen novelists, writing the classic Amazon and Swallows series which has stood the test of time. Sedgwick and Ransome in one tale, what more could you have asked for? Another great tale of war by Sedgwick is The Foreshadowing, set in WWI with a twist you could not have dreamt up if you wanted to!

 

 

Since 1991, Suzanne Collins has been busy writing for children’s television. She has worked on the staffs of several Nickelodeon shows. While working in television, she met a children’s author who talked her into giving children’s books a try.

As a child Suzanne liked gymnastics, reading and running around the woods with her friends, which might be why the Hunger Games always take part in the forests. She is the youngest of four children and grew up mostly in New York but also in Europe as her father was in the Air Force.

If Suzanne had to grab a backpack at the start of the Hunger Games she would hope for a flashlight, water and chocolate, as those are the things she always travels with, but maybe also a GPS as she has a terrible sense of direction and gets lost all the time.

“It’s hard to choose one element that inspired The Hunger Games,” she says. “Probably the first seeds were planted when, as an eight-year-old with a mythology obsession, I read the story of Theseus. The myth told how in punishment for past deeds, Athens periodically had to send seven youths and seven maidens to Crete where they were thrown in the Labyrinth and devoured by the monstrous Minotaur. Even as a third grader, I could appreciate the ruthlessness of this message. ‘Mess with us and we’ll do something worse than kill you. We’ll kill your children.”

Other early influences would have to include watching too many gladiator movies which dramatized the Romans’ flair for turning executions into popular entertainment, my military specialist dad who took us to battlefields for family vacations, and touring with a sword fighting company in high school. But it wasn’t until the much more recent experience of channel surfing between reality TV programming and actual war coverage that the story for this series came to me.”

 

It’s the day of the Reaping, an annual ritual, an annual reminder that rebelling against the Capitol is futile.  This afternoon all the residents of Panem will gather in the town square of each of its twelve districts to watch the drawing.  The names of all the children in every district between the ages of 12 and 18 have been put into large bowls filled with slips of paper.  One boy, one girl.  They will represent their district in the Hunger Games.  All twenty-four will be trained for a week, then herded into an arena, where they will be forced to fight to the death, as the entire population watches on live television.  The winner is the last person left alive.

Katniss is from District 12, the smallest and the most distant from the Capitol.  She’s 16, and the sole support of her mother and younger sister.  She hunts for food to feed them, and to barter at the market for soap, or salt, or clothing.   That afternoon, she doesn’t hear her own name called, but her little sister’s.  Prim is only 12, this is her first Hunger Games, and as gentle and fragile as she is, she won’t live long. Katniss immediately volunteers to take Prim’s place.  The boy’s name is drawn, and Peeta, the baker’s son, walks toward the stage, his face emotionless, stunned.  He doesn’t look like he’s ever missed a meal, muscular and strong.  Everyone in the town likes him, even Katniss.  He helped her once, long ago, when she was alone and desperate.  She’s never forgotten, and from the looks he’s giving her, he hasn’t forgotten either.

In another world, they might have been friends, or more.  But in this world, they have to be enemies, prepared to kill each other.  In the Hunger Games, there is only one winner.