Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

I’d heard of this book before I read it. It sounded intriguingly like a cross between Ender’s Game, Logan’s Run and A Canticle for Leibowitz. (You can tell what sort of books I enjoyed growing up on.) But it did have certain strikes against it:

1. It’s written in the first person—not my favorite.
2. It’s written in the present tense—something I’ve encountered rarely enough in reading that I naturally view it with suspicion.
3. It’s the second book in a series and I haven’t read the first.

However,

1. It’s also fantastic!

The author, Suzanne Collins, does an excellent job of drawing the reader straight into the story. Perhaps first person present tense really does work—if used by a master. The point of view is flawless, and the character all too natural and believable flawed. Katniss tells her story as she sees it, and if the reader comes to believe something else might lie behind the events she relates, the writing just makes me more eager to see it play out.

As to this being the second in a series, I’ve rarely read a “sequel” that so effectively and naturally tells the past through its echoes in the present. I can’t wait to find The Hunger Games and read for myself how Katniss, Peeta and Gale arrived at their present predicament.

The vicious games of the first book reappear in the second, with Katniss and Peeta battling again for their lives, while politicians and profiteers manipulate circumstance. Gale is a realist, wounded and angry, Peeta an idealist with a silver tongue, and Katniss, the narrator, is a fun, feisty, confused teenager, pushed into one relationship while seeking another, wise and savvy, responsible and kind, yet youthfully naïve.

The world of the Districts is vividly portrayed. I don’t know if the first book would tell me more of its history, but the post-apocalyptic mixture of technology and manual labor is believably dark, with strong characters carving very plausible lives out of misery and despair. I want to know more, but I never get the feeling of secrets being kept from me—just kept from the narrator who desires to understand even more than I do.

The action scenes are fast and furious. The relationships are natural, deep, and lightly rendered. Inner turmoil in Katniss’s thoughts and feelings play a vital part in the story but never take over. And the whole is a beautifully paced, neatly plotted, intriguing young adult tale of star-crossed love in a cruelly star-crossed world.