2) I liked it the first time I saw it, when it was called Battle Royale.
I thought the exploding collar idea was great when Stephen King wrote it in The Running Man in the 80s.
Very true. Take that, mix in some of The Long Walk, saute with a bit of Battle Royale, add a healthy amount of Twilight, and you have The Hunger Games.
You seem to know a lot about a book that you have never read.
I know lots of adults who gush about it all the time, along with Twilight and Harry Potter, hence my initial post.
You never read Harry Potter either I imagine. It was a mostly excellent series of books.I never really heard much good about Twilight nor did I hear how it was a cross generational phenomenon. Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner is what drew the adult women to see the films, I don't think those women were reading the books, which contain a very negative opinion of independent women. And certainly very few teenage or adult men were reading them, so I am not sure why you would put it in the same category.
Frankly when I first started to read the Hunger Games I was shocked to find out that people were letting their children read these books as they are extraordinarily violent. Easily on a Battle Royale level of bloody and gruesome. I would not be happy to have my 12-13 year old be reading that kind of violent content. But
I find that many parents are very permissive with their children and, IMO, often choose to follow the path of least resistance rather than making difficult choices that will cause the child to push back even a little bit.