When I was a kid my favorite game was “Let’s Pretend.”
Every child plays one version or another. You create a world for
a day, or an afternoon, complete with rules, with adventures,
with tragedies and silly happenings, everything from tea parties
to out-and-out galactic warfare. But then your mom calls you in
for dinner, or to do chores or homework, and game time ends.
Poof! The pretend world evaporates into thin air, never to exist
in exactly the same way again.

But what if it never vanished? What if all that pretense, that
make-believe, wasn’t imaginary at all? What if your whole
world, day-in and day-out, was made up of pretense, lies, and
deceit? What if your life or your death depended on rules that
change on a whim? What if to survive at all, you too have to
learn to play a game of smoke and mirrors—to master a game
constructed of lies, one that you can never control?

Katniss Everdeen, in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series,
is forced to do just that. Even as Katniss  …