The Hunger Games

My oldest daughter read The Hunger Games for a class, and she’s never been a huge fiction kid, but she was *obsessed* and reading at every spare moment she had. I love when books open a portal for kids to walk through and exist in a whole new world, characters, and places dreamed up in an author’s mind.

People hear Hunger Games and the general plot, and they’re like “Ugh, that sounds awful,” and yeah, it is. It’s an awful, violent, cruel concept, which is …kind of the whole point. Violence is horrific. Killing people is horrific. Unimaginable manipulation and poverty and evil regimes are horrific. Oppression is horrific. Like anyone who writes about tragedy, war, or truly messed up societies, Collins created a novel series in which you are appalled by the situation and are desperately rooting for the characters you love to prevail. For good to prevail. The plot is the point.

As my daughter got to the 2^nd and 3^rd books, the Minnesota raids were front and center news. Pretti and Good had shaken us deeply, as had the violent capturing of citizens and immigrants, including children. Separating them from their families. Taking them off the streets to god knows where. The fear of what could happen next, because rules seem to be turned upside down. As protests swelled and we saw a community standing up for its people grow larger and larger and take the stage, my daughter said, “Mom. We are living so much of the Hunger Games.” She’s thirteen.

She would tell me details from the book when she got to something interesting. Sometimes I remembered, and when I didn’t, she’d say “How can you forget that??” So I promised that I would read it again, after she was done. I had to remind her that the last time I read the books, I was literally pregnant with her, on bedrest with preeclampsia, almost fourteen years ago. “A lot has happened in my brain since then!” I told her.  “Now who the heck is Haymitch again??”

I finally re-read the first book. Perhaps the first time I read it sticks in my memory because it was such an important time in our life; literally waiting for our first baby, on the very cusp of the biggest chapter of our lives. Page in mid-turn. I wasn’t allowed to do much, instructed that it would send my blood pressure up and complicate both my and the baby’s health further. Stroke and seizures are not recommended in labor, apparently. I sat in our bed and on our couch just reading for days. I was mostly excited though, honestly. I couldn’t wait to meet our little girl. Ignorance is bliss – I had no idea just how much could go wrong, having never been through labor or motherhood, a more severe preeclampsia, or even the painful depths of stillbirth which I would experience years later. I mostly associate those days before she was born with just joy and anticipation.  Which I love.

As I read the novel this second time, so many years later, it felt very different. I realized I’m reading it as an entirely different person.

Two months after our first daughter was born, Sandy Hook happened. And something fundamental in me and our country shifted, when twenty-some children were senselessly murdered and Congress did nothing. Since then, school shooting after school shooting has sent fear rippling through my body to the bone, afraid that my babies would one day be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Please God, keep them safe, I have prayed over and over. I remember Pulse, Las Vegas, the synagogues, the concerts, the grocery stores, the disgruntled employees, anywhere. Victim upon victim, death after death. Still, our country has done nothing. Some of our leaders send out Christmas cards with their whole families holding AR14’s and other arsenal, in fact. While my babies know how to hide in their classrooms. They know if a lockdown happens while they are in the hallway that they are screwed if a door locks too soon; they know to stand on toilets in the bathroom to hide their feet; they know to play dead. My youngest is seven.

Just yesterday, we read the news that casually announced annihilating an entire civilization, in a war started by bombing children senselessly across the world. This, among literal thousands of headlines that normalize violence, assault, power, greed, insanity.

Reading the Hunger Games this time, it felt different. The Reaping may be fiction, but the danger my children face in 2026 America is real. I have felt what Katniss feels for Prim and Rue, willing to do anything to protect those I love. Hating how much is out of my control and at the whim of crazy men who view lives as pawns in their games. My heart feeling for those even less safe than us, the mothers waiting to see if these bombs were a bluff or real.

The scene in which District 11 sends bread to Katniss had me in tears. Because I, too, have now witnessed communities, people connected through horror, reach out to each other to say “I see you fighting for us.” Protecting each other. Outraged when they took the little boy with the spiderman backpack and a blue hat. Rising up to stand with their friends, families, and strangers. Covering bodies in wildflowers to honor them.

I have woken up to headlines that hurt my heart, make me look to the woods as Gage did.

Closing my eyes, I see 24-year-old pregnant me on our old couch, rubbing the kicking feet beneath her skin, smiling at the days to come. Since then, my husband and I have raised 3 children, we’ve changed jobs, we moved houses, we walked our little ones to kindergarten and celebrated their report cards and plays and soccer games at the Y. We’ve made sprinkle-covered birthday cakes and made a million ordinary memories I wouldn’t trade for anything. We’ve also been through 3 miscarriages, and the loss of a baby boy who was too small to survive.  We have survived a pandemic, watching millions die from a virus while we wiped down groceries, stayed home, and switched school to the backyard. We have been through presidents, elections, the attack on the capitol, BLM protests and riots after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. We’ve watched the last year burn. I realized I have watched many people of my country be shot point-blank, on the tiny rectangle screen in front of me, filmed by an onlooker.

Fourteen years ago, all my grandparents were alive and I could call them anytime to hear their voices. They, too, have crossed over. Friends have died. We’ve lost people we love dearly.

Perhaps that’s what it is that made this reading of Hunger Games so different. The dying.

The fiction feels less fantasy, closer to the scars of loss I’ve felt personally, and the heartbreak of watching strangers’ bodies be chillingly stilled forever by violence, strangers who are someone’s beloved. I suppose I should be thankful it took till adulthood to witness such frequent horror, and that much has been from a distance so far.

But I am also changed, and thus, how I take in the world is changed.

Honestly, I still think it’s a damn good book. I’ll read the next two again too. Perhaps they’ll also make my heart tighten in ways it didn’t before. Perhaps they’ll give me hope. That good prevails. That it’s never too late to do the right thing. That we can be the best version of ourselves as a world, but sometimes it takes bravery. That we must be the boy with the bread, the girl on fire, the district who said no.

I wish I could read a book like this in a less parrel timeline, one in which I am easily dreaming and unaware of how gritty and hard the world can truly be. Ah well.

Perhaps now I am mainly reminded what we face in this world. And that living means facing it with courage.

So here we are.

May the odds be ever in our favor.