The Hunger Games is an annual event in which one boy and one girl aged 12–18 from each of the twelve districts surrounding the Capitol are selected by lottery to compete in a televised battle royale to the death.

The novel won many awards, including the California Young Reader Medal, and was named one of Publishers Weekly's "Best Books of the Year" in 2008.

[4] In the nation of Panem, established in the remains of North America after an apocalyptic event, the wealthy Capitol exploits the twelve surrounding districts for their natural resources and labor.

The Games begin, and nearly half the tributes are killed at the start whilst fighting over weapons and supplies in an area in the center of the arena known as the Cornucopia.

Katniss disregards Haymitch's earlier advice to flee immediately and nearly dies but uses her well-practiced hunting and survival skills to hide in the woods.

Katniss cuts it down, releasing the flying insects, which are genetically modified to track whoever disturbs their nest and have venom that targets the section of their victims’ minds that houses fear.

In an interview with Collins, it was noted that the novel "tackles issues like severe poverty, starvation, oppression, and the effects of war among others.

[2] The citizens' starvation and their need for resources, both in and outside of the arena, create an atmosphere of helplessness that the main characters try to overcome in their fight for survival.

Katniss needs to hunt to provide food for her family, resulting in the development of skills that are useful to her in the Games (such as her proficiency with the bow and arrow), and represents her rejection of the Capitol's rules in the face of life-threatening situations.

[7] On the subject of the Games' parallels with popular culture, Darren Franich of Entertainment Weekly writes that the book "is an incisive satire of reality television shows", and that the character of Cinna "almost seems like a contestant on a fascist version of Project Runway, using Katniss' outfits as a vehicle to express potentially dangerous ideas.

[7] Library journal Voice of Youth Advocates names the major themes of The Hunger Games as "government control, 'big brother', and personal independence.

[10] Laura Miller of The New Yorker finds the author's stated premise of the Games –an exercise in propaganda and a "humiliating as well as torturous [...] punishment" for a failed uprising against the Capitol many years earlier– to be unconvincing.

"You don't demoralize and dehumanize a subject people by turning them into celebrities and coaching them on how to craft an appealing persona for a mass audience."

Everyone's always watching you, scrutinizing your clothes or your friends and obsessing over whether you're having sex or taking drugs or getting good enough grades, but no one cares who you really are or how you really feel about anything.

[12][13] Brake, as well as another reviewer, Amy Simpson, both find that the story also revolves around the theme of hope, which is exemplified in the "incorruptible goodness of Katniss' sister, Primrose.

[18] By the time the film adaptation of The Hunger Games was released in March 2012, the book had been on USA Today's best-sellers list for 135 consecutive weeks and has sold over 17.5 million copies.

"[25] School Library Journal also praised the audiobook, stating that "McCormick ably voices the action-packed sequences and Katniss's every fear and strength shines through, along with her doomed growing attraction to one of her fellow Tributes.

"[26] The Tim O'Brien-designed cover features a gold "mockingjay" – a fictional bird in The Hunger Games born by crossbreeding female mockingbirds and genetically engineered male "jabberjays" – with an arrow engraved in a circle.

[27] The image matches the description of the pin that is given in the novel, except for the arrow: "It's as if someone fashioned a small golden bird and then attached a ring around it.

"[32] Time magazine's review was also positive, stating that it "is a chilling, bloody and thoroughly horrifying book" and praising what it called the "hypnotic" quality of the violence.

[33] In Stephen King's review for Entertainment Weekly, he compared it to "shoot-it-if-it-moves videogames in the lobby of the local eightplex; you know it's not real, but you keep plugging in quarters anyway."

However, he stated that there were "displays of authorial laziness that kids will accept more readily than adults" and that the love triangle was standard for the genre.

[34] Elizabeth Bird of School Library Journal praised the novel, saying it is "exciting, poignant, thoughtful, and breathtaking by turns", and called it one of the best books of 2008.

[37] Rick Riordan, author of the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, claims it is the "closest thing to a perfect adventure novel" he has ever read.

[46] In the 2012 edition of Scholastic's Parent and Child magazine, The Hunger Games was listed as the 33rd-best book for children, with the award for "Most Exciting Ending".

[49] However, the novel has also been controversial with parents;[50] it ranked in fifth place on the American Library Association's list of frequently challenged books for 2010, with "unsuited to age group" and "violence" being among the reasons cited.

[52] Susan Dominus of The New York Times reports that "the parallels are striking enough that Collins's work has been savaged on the blogosphere as a baldfaced ripoff" of Battle Royale but argued that "there are enough possible sources for the plot line that the two authors might well have hit on the same basic setup independently.

"[53] Stephen King noted that the reality TV "badlands" were similar to Battle Royale, as well as his own novels The Running Man and The Long Walk.

[54] In March 2009, Lions Gate Entertainment entered into a co-production agreement for The Hunger Games with Nina Jacobson's production company Color Force, which had acquired worldwide distribution rights to the novel a few weeks earlier.