I really didn't know what I was getting myself into when I started reading these books. I enjoyed the movies (because who doesn't like dystopian badass women with bows and arrows fighting for their lives against an evil tyrant), but I wasn't prepared for how much I would lose myself in the books. Immediately after finishing The Hunger Games I ran out to get Catching Fire and Mockingjay. I read the series in about 2 weeks (I do have a full time job, and I'm addicted to TV). I absorbed them. You get so much more out of the books than you do the movies, which I find to be true about pretty much all books-turned-movies out there. Plus, having the inside track on a character's thoughts really gives you a lot more to go on when trying to understand their actions.
Collins creates a believable, fractured world system in which the government can choose children from each District to fight to the death as a reminder to not ride up against the powers that be. The people of the Capitol are so removed from the reality of Katniss's District and other poor Districts that the juxtaposition is constantly bringing the reader into unity with Katniss. The character really comes alive because she is thinking what we are all thinking.
Katniss is such a complex character that you can't help but believe her veracity. She is straightforward in her goal - staying alive. She really hasn't thought too much about love or boyfriends because she's constantly trying to feed her family and provide for them back in District 12. When the Hunger Games start, she eventually realizes that she will have to show the world watching that she and Peeta are deep in love if she has any hope of survival. He's likable and, to the viewers, has been trying to help Katniss the whole time. Katniss just sees the boy with the bread, the boy who saw her at her lowest and saved her life, the boy she can never repay. She knows she can't kill him, this boy who gave her family a future, but she has to walk a fine line of survival and love story. For Peeta, it's real. Katniss has been his dream since the day he first saw her. But Katniss has to "fake it til she makes it" and play a role to win her life. By the end, she's not sure where the pretend stops and the real feelings start. In the arena, with Katniss and Peeta as the final two tributes, Katniss makes a decision to test the Capitol's resolve. Will they allow both victors to live and appease the masses or force them to take their own lives and have a Hunger Games with no victor? When Seneca Crane, the designer of this year's Hunger Games finally tells them that they both can live, Katniss thinks she has finally won her freedom. However, by standing up to the Capitol, Katniss has unknowingly become the face of a revolutionary movement. Now she and Peeta are in danger. To convince the Capitol and President Snow that they aren't revolutionists, Katniss and Peeta must continue to play out their love story for the cameras. With the Games over, Peeta realized Katniss was only pretending. He's hurt, but he also wants to live. They decide to only play their parts when cameras are on them. If they aren't being filmed, they don't even talk. It's a difficult life to live, but they have to survive. Katniss is confronted by feelings of guilt for betraying Peeta, but she's unsure if she's really betraying him. She might love him, if she had time to give it any thought. But that thinking creates friction between her and Gale, her best friend who wants to be more than friends. He isn't convinced it's all an act on Katniss's part, and while he knows that she had to do what she had to do in the arena to survive, he can't help but be hurt to learn that she loves Peeta, true or not. Gale has been with Katniss through every hard time in her life, but he couldn't be with her in the Hunger Games. He couldn't be the one to help her or the one she shared feelings with. Suddenly he feels useless to her and jealous of that baker.
It seems every character is fighting to understand what they really feel and why. Peeta is fighting between loving Katniss and holding back from her because he can't be sure how she feels about him. Gale is trying to reconcile that Katniss's feelings were an act and his feeling of loss and jealousy over her actions. Katniss is trying to understand how going from trying not to starve got her attention from two young men that she suddenly has to decide how she feels about. She feels pushed to make a decision that she can't make yet because she isn't sure how long the Peeta-Katniss love story must go on to appease the Capitol. She also has never thought about how she feels about Gale. He's just always been there for her. He was a constant in her life that she didn't know she needed to claim or lose. Over all though, is the shadow of the Capitol and President Snow making this "love triangle" and the confused feelings almost insignificant were it not for those feelings having saved Katniss and Peeta's lives.
Bottom line: it's a story of real people with real feelings and an incredibly real tyrannical government dictating the lives of individuals. How those lines intersect makes for a wonderful, terrible story that grabs you and won't let go until you know how it all ends.
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