It is no stretch of the imagination to say that Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy is one of the best YA series to exist. I don’t need to specify genre when I say this because it truly is one of the best series ever. Even reading the books with an adult lens, The Hunger Games trilogy contains so much plausible and believable world building and detail that is doesn’t feel like YA, showing how the reading experience can be appreciated by all ages. After speeding through my reread of the series, I passed it over to my mum and this is the fastest series I’ve seen her read. The Hunger Games Trilogy is just that mesmerising.

The Hunger Games starts the series off running, creating such an immersive, tense, and tragic world to bear witness to. What I love most about this book besides its fantastic description and narrative voice, is Katniss’s importance to her district. The movie didn’t show it to me, but the book hammers it home that many in District Twelve rely on Katniss, and she is a well-liked and respected girl; Madge proves Katniss has friends and that she cares for people outside of her family and Gale’s family. Peeta’s dad visiting Katniss in the Mayor’s building after the reaping highlights how significant her hunting and trading is for not just the Seam and the Hub, but for the more wealthy in the district too. When the district salutes Katniss at the Reaping, I felt it actually meant something in the book.

The lead-up to the 74th Hunger Games and the games themselves are intense and really build Katniss and Peeta’s characters and relationship. I loved reading Katniss’s emotional and how she made the cameras see a different emotion that she was feeling. I loved reading her uncertainty and mixed feelings about Peeta – how he’s on her side, then he’s with the Careers, then he’s supposedly saving her, then he disappears for a while until she finds him. Her thoughts and reactions create such a great blend of good pacing and high tension, and overall I view The Hunger Games very favourably, earning a solid 5 stars.

Catching Fire marks the point where the books and the films deviate the most for me as the novel focuses more on the rebellion and trying to tamper it down before the Third Quarter Quell announcement changed everything. The fear of the Capitol and the way District Twelve suddenly is faced with a new set of Peacekeepers is also handled very differently in the books. Catching Fire is a step up, a step into the adult world within Panem, and a wake-up call to how all the districts are being treated. I wish we got to see more of the Victory Tour scenes and the treatment in the other districts in the movie because I find they help to establish the direction everything is moving in regardless of Katniss’s input or influence. I also wish we got to see little snippet of the previous victors during their games.

Catching Fire is a great book and it contains many incredible story elements and techniques that make reading the novel an immensely enjoyable time. I do find some bits feel a little less punchy the The Hunger Games, so I rate Catching Fire a 4.5/5

Mockingjay then takes everything a step further, deeper into the rebel perspective, but what I love most about this book is that we still she Katniss as she was in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire. She reluctantly becomes the face of the rebellion, and she willingly and regularly disobeys orders for her own impulses. How she feels about Peeta is completely different to how others do, not just because of the romantic thread but because of the strong influence of Snow and his manipulation making things more grey and blurry than the supposed black and white that District Thirteen sees. I found it really interesting how Katniss and her experience as a District Twelve citizen clashes to much with President Coin or any District Thirteen citizen for that matter. This awareness of other districts muddies the waters between her and others, creating great internal and external conflict on top of the obvious conflict with the Capitol.

The 76th Hunger Games are interesting, gruesome and engaging, but the lulls between action had a yo-yo effect at times that made me less invested in what was happening. They also went by so quickly that I felt there was no time to linger on the deaths as a reader. Post bombing, it fell into the same cycle Katniss displayed back in District Thirteen; the wandering and hiding and dissociating from the world around her. I liked this at the end, but the numerous times it came up early in the book made it less effective as a story mechanism in my eyes. This makes Mockingjay a 4.5/5

Overall, The Hunger Games trilogy sits at a 4.5/5 which is an incredible feat for a series. I don’t have many, if any, YA series I rate higher than 4/5 overall. The Hunger Games ticks so many boxes for me and still, even a decade after first reading them, hits just as hard, if not harder now that I see the full impact of the events within the series. I know I will be holding onto my copies until they are illegible.