How A Kid-Lit Favorite Is Really About Trash TelevisionS
Katniss Everdeen is not here to make friends — she's here to
win. In fact, her livelihood depends on it.  Katniss is the
reluctant heroine of Suzanne Collins' increasingly beloved
Hunger Games trilogy, a young-adult book series that any adult
can read without shame (the series' final installment,
Mockingjay, hit shelves this week).  The series paints a
dystopian vision of the United States sometime in the not-so-
distant future; the natural-disaster-and-war-ravaged land we
once called home is now dubbed Panem, subdivided into 13
poverty-stricken districts that span what was once Middle
America and ruled by an oppressive dictatorship known as the
Capitol. As retroactive punishment for a period known as the
Dark Days, when a citizen uprising threatened to overthrow the
government, every year the Capitol holds a competition dubbed
the Hunger Games, in which one boy and one girl, aged 12-18,
from each of the populated districts is selected at random and
for