THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE

My unfamiliarity with its source material was, I'm convinced, a large part of why I enjoyed last year's The Hunger Games movie so much. To be sure, I dug the film itself, with its exciting and moving survival-of-the-fittest encounters, and its fierce Jennifer Lawrence performance, and its bevy of grandly outré supporting figures (and, in the Capitol sequences, beyond-outré production design). But not having read any of the three books in Suzanne Collins' seminal young-adult adventure series, what I was most taken with was the surprise of the experience. Hunger Games newbies such as myself were allowed to take in Collins' richly imagined dystopian saga with gradual understanding and horror, much the way (I'm presuming) the books' readers did, and while we had every reason to expect Lawrence's teen warrior Katniss Everdeen to survive, the storyline was just spiky and unpredictable enough to make us wonder how, exactly, she ever would.