“Whether you love The Hunger Games or just love survival, look at this book as an extension of the skills used by Katniss, her friends, and her enemies to stay alive in desperate situations.”

Summary: A great introduction to survival techniques for any fan of The Hunger Games. Creek Stewart teaches the survival techniques Katniss & company used in the arena and District 12, and he expands on other skills that would help you in any survival situation.

“Train like a tribute before you enter the Arena using this wilderness survival guide—you don’t have to live in Panem to put these survival skills to use. Experience adventure of life in District 12 by learning and practicing the survival skills used by Katniss, Peeta, Gale and their friends.”

Quick Review: Really great information; written for Hunger Games fans, but even non-Hunger Games fans (if they exist) will want this book if they’re ever stranded in the wilderness.

First Impression: This could be a great book for me. I know absolutely nothing when it comes to surviving outside my house, and who knows when I might need some survival skills.

My Review: You know that game ‘Desert Island,’ where you choose only 5 books/movies/items to be stranded with? Change that to ‘stranded in the wilderness’ and this book is one of my 5. I don’t normally read survival preparedness books, but this one was intriguing. I mean, you wonder if any of the stuff Katniss did to survive would really work or if Peeta would really last days in a ditch camouflaged as a rock (a much easier camouflage technique is given in the book for those of us with little to no artistic ability).

That’s what’s fascinating about books & movies about survival. It makes you think, would I be able to do it? Would I have that survivor’s mentality? Could I keep myself alive like Katniss? That’s the brilliance of this book. It gives you valuable information in a way that’s relatable. It uses The Hunger Games as a starting point while giving you a variety of survival techniques & tips.

For example, the author, Creek Stewart, shows us how to create Gale’s twitch-up snare:

“Gale’s famous twitch-up snares—Katniss thinks so highly of them that she gives Gale a bow and arrow in exchange for teaching her how to make and set these snares. And she’s right; these snares are a great way to catch small game, like rabbits, without expending a lot of time and energy.”

Seriously, the diagrams and instructions make it seem like even I could set up a snare.

Then, he goes past The Hunger Games to give information on how to use the hide of an animal in various ways, how to keep fish alive until you need to eat it, how to signal for rescue, and a myriad of other techniques.

I’m not too sure I could survive long without running water & electricity, but reading this book makes me believe I might actually be able to keep myself alive. I do have a sudden urge to practice starting a fire, or create a survival bag for my family (with this book inside), because as Creek Stewart says,

“If we take time now to learn survival skills that we might need later, the odds begin to shift in our favor.”

Favorite Part or Passage: Survival Mentality: Think Like a Victor – this is a great chapter to start the book. You could have all the skills you need, but if you don’t have the proper mindset, you might not last as long as you thought. It gets you thinking about why you would want to survive. Also in this chapter is a great quote about Katniss:

“I have a deep respect for Katniss. That girl is a fighter. She never gives up. Even after being burned, knocked out, blown down, trapped in a tree, cut, shot, broken, dehydrated, medicated, starved, deafened and mentally tortured, she still never gives up. Her will to survive often overcomes the seemingly unmanageable situations she finds herself in.”

For Fans of: The Hunger Games, Ashes (Ilsa Bick), survival books and apocalypse preparedness

You can buy this book on Amazon or at Creek Stewart’s website HERE. He also has a lot of tips and other books, such as his YA fiction novel, Rugosa, that’s coming out soon. Read more about Creek Stewart HERE.

And a huge thanks to the author, Creek Stewart, for sending us a copy of The Unofficial Hunger Games Wilderness Survival Guide to review!

Blacksparrow Auctions is having a giveaway of Hunger Games goodies on Facebook.

The grand prize for Blacksparrow Auctions’ Hunger Games Sweepstakes is a collection of two Hunger Games movie companion books and six posters. The books are The Hunger Games: Official Illustrated Movie Companion and The World of the Hunger Games, both by Kate Egan. The prize also includes character posters for Peeta, Haymitch, Rue, Cinna and Cato. Lastly, the prize will include a Catching Fire poster.

The sweepstakes ends on Sunday, April 28. To enter for a chance to win that cool prize pack, go HERE.

Source: Mockingjay.net

The Hunger Games trilogy has a variety of cover art, so it’s only fair that Suzanne Collins’ other series, Gregor the Underland Chronicles, gets a facelift. EW has revealed the new covers for this five-book fantasy series. Here’s a little taste of how it looks:

See the rest of the covers HERE. Have you read The Underland Chronicles, and if not, will you now?

Source: EW Shelf Life

Even though the first book came out in 2008, all three books of The Hunger Games trilogy have remained on bestseller lists throughout 2012.

But at No. 2, thanks to Hollywood, is The Hunger Games, the first book in Collins’ trilogy — four years after it was published. It got a big boost from the hit movie, starring Jennifer Lawrence, released in March. James’ other books are Nos. 3 and 4, followed by Collins at Nos. 5 and 6 for the year.

Read the rest of the article HERE. I wouldn’t be surprised if Catching Fire remains on that list this year as well.

Source: USA Today via The Hunger Games fansite

Holy beautiful books!! The ABC Shop in Australia is selling luxury paperback editions of The Hunger Games trilogy, with metallic logos and  gilded-edges to match the color of the logos. Here’s a picture of the books found on Tumblr:

And another from KIWIreviews:

 I wish these were sold in the US! Right now you can buy them from The ABC Shop for $24.99 each, but international shipping would be about $27. So you’d basically be paying for four books instead of three. But it might just be worth it, since these books are so incredibly beautiful! Will you be buying the luxury editions? They might make a good Christmas present!

Source: ABC Shop via My Hunger Games, KIWIreviews

 It’s Banned Book Week, and the American Library Association has released this year’s list of most challenged books. The Hunger Games has once again made this list.

Of course, making the challenged books list isn’t necessarily a good thing — although many authors today have embraced it as a badge of honor. Books on this list are those most frequently challenged by parents and adults around the country, who want the book banned from libraries and/or school reading lists.

Part of what Banned Books Week celebrates is the fact that, despite these challenges, we live in a country where these books do remain on the library shelves.

The Hunger Games was number three on the list this year, cited for the following reasons: anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence. With the book’s rise in popularity, it’s likely The Hunger Games will continue to see challenges over the next few years.

You can see the rest of the list HERE. And one Texas library is using The Hunger Games to promote Banned Books Week. You see the rest of the posters HERE.

Source: Hunger Games Examiner

The Hunger Games has brought a lot of attention to Henry River, North Carolina. This small, abandoned cotton-manufacturing village was the sight for Katniss Everdeen’s home, District 12. The New York Press recently interviewed Nicole Callihan, co-author of Images of America: Henry River Mill Village. This book, written with Ruby Young Keller, explores life in this small community before time passed it by. Here’s what Callihan had to say about Henry River Mill Village and the renewed interest created by The Hunger Games:

NYP: What was the experience like for you to research for this book?

NC: I traveled down to North Carolina several times. It was unearthing. I had started a related project about seven years ago – more of a creative project with poems and pictures – and I started doing interviews back then, and then this particular book, we started working on it in the past year. There was a lot of renewed interest in the village because of The Hunger Games. We just ate pie and sat around and talked about way things used to be.

NYP: How would you describe life at Henry River Mill Village?

NC: It was a very close-knit community. People sat on the porch reading and making music. In the families, one person worked the first eight-hour shift and another parent worked the next, so someone would always be watching the children. The people helped each other out during hard times – they gave tomatoes and potatoes to each other. They shared a lot of blackberries, and [there was] a lot of eating blackberries and drawing of vegetables.

NYP: What did you think when you heard that Henry River Mill Village would be the set for District 12 in The Hunger Games? Do you find that the book has attracted more people to visit the village?

NC: When I first saw the village, it looked like no one had touched it in a century – it was so abandoned, and there was little life there. No one had lived in the village in 20 years. On Saturday, we had our big book launch and there were 1,000 people there, and there were people on porches playing music and there were families and face painting and ice cream trucks and hot dog stands. This place that had been completely neglected is now getting a lot of attention. The Sci-Fi channel is auctioning it off on the show Hollywood Treasure – they are looking to auction the town off for someone who wanted to preserve it.

We really hope that [The Hunger Games] will draw attention to Henry River to help with preservation, and the North Carolina textile industry. It’s just a thing to see. It looks exactly like District 12 – they used it exactly as it is.

Read the rest of the interview HERE. You can read a synopsis of the book HERE.

Source: New York Press

National Public Radio recently released their Top 100 Teen Books list, and most of the authors on this list are female. Since this list was voted on by the public, there could be many reasons for the majority being female authors. Meghan Lewit, for The Atlantic, addresses this issue:

I’m not alone in my regard for the great female storytellers of teen fiction. Nearly all of these authors appear on the NPR list. More than 75,000 votes were cast to cull the list of 235 finalists to the top 100. Also notable: Of those 235 titles, 147 (or 63 percent) were written by women—a parity that would seem like a minor miracle in some other genres. Female authors took the top three slots, and an approximately equal share of the top 100. As a comparison, you’d have to scroll all the way to number 20 on last summer’s Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy list to find a woman’s name (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley).

Meanwhile, to the consternation of some men in the field, the YA genre tends to favor female authors and audiences. And at least commercially, teen fiction is crushing almost everyone else. Three of the biggest book-to-movie franchises of the last decade (Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games) are YA series penned by women. According to an annual report by the Association of American Publishers, Children’s/YA ranked as the fastest growing category in publishing in 2011. While teen titles may never reach the upper echelons of critical adulation bestowed on the latest Jonathan Franzen novel, the phenomenal popularity makes it increasingly difficult to marginalize the genre.

Lewit also addresses the surge of popularity of YA fiction among adults:

Plenty of theories have been floated to explain YA’s surge, particularly among adult readers. Some attribute it to ingenious marketing or to the childlike simplicity of the plots, suggesting that the craze is a distressing symptom of a reading public congenitally adverse to nuance. Matazzoni proposes that for adult readers, nostalgia plays an important role: “Readers have fond memories of being curled up with a book, in the summertime especially. Memories are what we believe people are tapping into, and the opportunity to share the books they love.”

He has a point. Even as teen fiction has become increasingly complex and dystopian, the genre comfortingly harkens to a time when reading was an act of pure joy and escapism. I’ve read a lot of wonderful books in my lifetime, but I don’t know that I’ve loved any of the novels I’ve read as an adult with the intensity that I loved the stories of adolescence–nor found such a wealth of female protagonists in their pages. YA lit offers heroines to suit every mercurial mood and developmental stage, from spunky, disaster-prone Anne Shirley to dreamy, bookish Francie Nolan and the modern ass-kicking incarnation of Katniss Everdeen.

Read the rest of her in-depth article HERE.

So this might be a case of a majority of YA readers are female, or maybe the publishing companies put out YA novels written by female authors. Or maybe the  female authors are more willing to write young adult novels than the male authors.Why do you think the majority of popular YA authors are female?

Source: The Atlantic