Did we read the same book?

I was reading my latest Entertainment Weekly the other day and I was excited to see that the lead review in the book section was for Catching Fire, Suzanne Collin's sequel to The Hunger Games. However, I barely got a paragraph into Jennifer Reese's review when I found myself muttering, "WTF!" Here's the opening paragraph of the review:

Last year, Suzanne Collins published The Hunger Games, the first in a projected young-adult trilogy about Katniss Everdeen, a heroic adolescent girl who crushed on a sexy hunter. In between romantic daydreams, Katniss shot strange beasts, dodged force fields, and battled murderous zombie werewolves — usually while wearing fabulous glitzy outfits.

Huh? Did Jennifer Reese read the same book that I did last fall? I remember The Hunger Games as a young adult novel about a dystopian future where every year young people are choosen at random to fight to the death. One of the opening scenes involves the heroine, Katniss, stealing into a forbidden area to hunt food for her family. The reason Katniss ends up in the games in the first place is because her 12-year-old sister is initially chosen and Kat knows there is no way she will survive. I don't remember a lot of romantic daydreams and though I vaguely remember that they tarted up the contestants before the battle began--all for the television ratings--I don't think any of those contestants wore those clothes onto the battlefield. Yeah . . . battlefield . . . fight to the death . . . not exactly the stuff of adolescent yearning . . .

In critiquing the second book, Reese notes that Collin's novel lacks the "erotic energy" of the Twilight series. Double huh? I think Twilight captures the adolecent yearning for all-consuming love (in all its scary passiveness) like no other series but it's so chaste that most folks (okay, maybe just me) kind of lost interest by book 2 and started rooting for the werewolf, Jacob, because he seemed so vibrant, alive, and well . . . real.

And I guess that's what makes me the most annoyed at Reese's review . . . the fact that she misses the essential "realness" of The Hunger Games-so real that I stayed up until 3:00 am reading it the day I bought it (and had to grumpily face a long day of work on three hours of sleep). It felt real like The Handmaiden's Tale felt real . . . like World War Z felt real . . . a scary future that has just enough of the present in it to stop your breath.

The fact that Reese misses this aspect of the novel suggests that she didn't read The Hunger Games very carefully. Actually, the general "comment" consensus after her review online is that she didn't actually read the first novel at all. Either way, it casts a lot of doubt on her review of the sequel. Also, my thought is if you wear your Twilght sunglasses to every young adult novel, you might miss a lot as many a librarian and middle school teacher hastened to point out.

For a good time, read the review and chuckle and then read the comments. With only one exception that I saw this morning, almost every single responder felt like I did. Did you read the first book? Do all young adult novels have to follow the Twilight formula (big yawn!)? My favorite response was from a sixteen-year-old, who used craptastic as an adjective and reminded Reese that Twilight was really a rip-off of a vampire series in the 90's. Go girl!

So, I look forward to reading Catching Fire soon and entering a fictional world that is far more vivid and real than Jennifer Reese's review.