Hunger Games and Harry Potter

Got your attention? No, I didn’t choose the title for this post just to draw viewers (though I’ll take it!), but because over the summer, I’ve been doing more fiction reading than I have in some time. (As a history professor, reading what I do most of the day, but fiction is a luxury I have failed to allow myself for too long.) While I intend to get back to Wolf Hall shortly, I recently read Hunger Games, and am re-reading the Harry Potter books. (My son has begun the series, and I need to be able to answer questions along the lines of, “Who was Ravenclaw’s keeper in the first book?”)

As I read Hunger Games, I was struck by the scene in which Katniss says good-bye to her mother before departing for the Games, and almost certain death. Up until that point, Suzanne Collins had successfully convinced me to see the world through Katniss’s eyes. I felt her grief at losing her father, sensed her attraction to Gale, and her love for Prim, and in forging this link between reader and protagonist Collins was no less successful than Rowling.

But in the scene between Katniss and her mother, the emotional bond I felt with Katniss was suddenly broken, and I experienced the scene from her mother’s perspective. No longer was I the brave protagonist heading off to match wits and strength with other teens. I had become a helpless parent, sending her daughter off to die. It was a wrenching change, and one that got me thinking about the way we read and write.