It’s Hunger Games Time! Mary Baldwin College Professor Louise Freeman, a longtime friend of this weblog. has jumped from the Pearl Plot and other ideas about Suzanne Collins’ dystopian novels posted here into exploration of neglected details of the series that open up fascinating possibilities about the series’ finale, The Mockingjay. I’ll be posting her insights here this week and next — stay tuned!

Female Victors, Probability and the Quarter Quell

A commonality shared by Johanna and Katniss on Catching Fire is their status as the lone female victor in their District.  Thus, when the conditions of the third Quarter Quell are announced, they are both in the position of being the only name in their Reaping lottery and therefore automatic “winners” of the 96% death chance that comes with being an Arena tribute.  Actually, the risk is probably even higher given their gender; with the emphasis on hand-to-hand combat in the Games, it is fair to assume there are more male than female victors.  So, the odds of survival for these women were probably never higher than 2% or so.  Or even less if you consider neither are from Career districts.

A little statistics, however, leads to a somewhat surprising conclusion.  In all probability (and I mean that quite literally) what’s remarkable about Katniss and Johanna is not their status as lone District female victors. What’s surprising is that we are never told of any other women in the same boat. [Read more…]

I hope in the coming weeks to comment on each of these two interview sets, interviews with the author of the Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins, but wanted to share these with those who may not be aware of them and to ask for links to other Suzanne Collins commentary on the books about which author-insights or lines of sight all of us should know.

At Scholastic.com: A series of five talks filmed after the publication of Hunger Games (the link takes you to the first talk and the other four are accessible at that page).

The Border’ Book Club Interviews: A series of seven talks filmed after the publication of Catching Fire (the link takes you to the first talk and the other six are accessible at that page).

If you cannot resist commenting on Ms. Collins’ remarks, please refer to the specific segment of which interview, e.g., “Scholastic, part 3, 1:43,” so we can access what you’re talking about!

(Check out the Borders Book Club interview with Mrs. Meyer about Twilight, too, while you’re on that page!)

As you may have noticed from my previous Hunger Games guest post, I am deeply interested in the connections between Suzanne Collins’s fiction and the very real history and culture of Appalachia, where I live, work, and teach Appalachian culture. My husband’s mother was born in a coal mining town, and her mother has graced us with wonderful oral history material regarding life in the coal towns.

“There’s a hole in this mountain, it’s dark and it’s deep,/And God only knows all the secrets it keeps./There’s a chill in the air only miners can feel/And there’s ghosts in the tunnels that the company sealed.”  The Mountain—Steve Earle

As the families of 29 Montcoal, WV, families mourn their loved ones lost in the mine explosion last Monday (the remaining four miners’ bodies were found over the weekend), Hunger Games readers might be thinking of Katniss Everdeen, whose father, along with her friend Gale’s father, was killed in an coal mining accident when Katniss was 11. In honor of those very real individuals and their families, it might be appropriate to look at a few of the ways in which Suzanne Collins’ fictional District 12 and its coal mining culture mirror the actual history and culture in the coal-mining regions of Appalachia.  Although this is a rather lengthy post, be assured that, pardon the pun, it only scratches the surface. [Read more…]