Maybe it’s because of my political background, but when
I read Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series the focus was never
about Team Gale or Team Peeta the way it was for so many
readers; the romance was a subplot. I majored in political science
in college, and when I’m not writing books for teens, I’m a
columnist for Hearst newspapers and a writer and blogger for
various political websites, including CT News Junkie and My
Left Nutmeg. To my mind, the Hunger Games trilogy was
always more about “The System”—a political system that would
not just allow but require children to fight to the death in televised
games.

According to an interview in the School Library Journal, Collins
said she drew her inspiration for the Hunger Games from
imagining a cross between the war in Iraq and reality TV, after
flipping through the channels one night and seeing the juxtaposition
between the coverage of the war and reality TV programming.
While I’ve never had the privilege of meeting
Suzanne Collins and have no idea as to her political views, I
don’t think that the uncanny similarity between the themes
she took on in Mockingjay and the issues that we as a nation
struggled with during the Bush administration’s War on
Terror is an accident.

Reading Mockingjay, I relived through Katniss some of the
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