High 6. Pulls its punches right at the finish.

Read it because my niece wouldn't stop going on about it, and I'll admit the first half is a lot better than I'd been prepared to admit.

The reaping, the training, the sponsors. That's a proper nasty system and Collins doesn't soften it. Kids killing kids on telly for the entertainment of a capital city. Rue's death is the real thing, the one bit that doesn't flinch.

Then the last act happens. Katniss barely kills anybody in cold blood. The genuinely compromising decisions all get handed off to Cato or the mutts or a bag of berries, and she walks out with her hands basically clean. Why does she get to come out clean? In an Abercrombie she'd have done something at that lake she couldn't come back from, and the book would have made her live in it afterwards.

High six. Well built, it moves, first-person present didn't bother me at all. It's a book about moral compromise where the heroine never actually gets compromised, and moral compromise is what I turn up for.