Katniss Everdeen

I haven't read "The Hunger Games," so I started from the beginning to really get a good grasp on the characters and the story.  I am absolutely in love with Katniss! Collins has me hooked. I am making connections to Katniss on so many levels, and sometimes I have to remind myself that she is only 16. The way Collins has written her characters makes them very believable even though the story is set in a dimension that is entirely unknown to readers. Katniss is very human. She makes mistakes; she's torn; she can barely handle the stress of taking care of her mother and Prim, much less the stress placed on  her by the Hunger Games and President Snow. The first book paints Katniss as a very brave heroine. She cares for nothing and no one but her family, Gale, and eventually Peeta. She comes across as a very hard person, which is completely understandable based on her life. Katniss is the kind of character that readers love to root for. Several times I thought, "Man, I wish I was as cool as Katniss!" The thing that really caught me about "Catching Fire," though, was how Collins brought a whole other level of character to Katniss. We begin to see her weaknesses and her misgivings. She's just a teenage girl, and now she has the weight of the fate of the entire nation on her shoulders. As much as loved warrior Katniss in the first book, I fell even more in love with the "real" Katniss who worries and feels like she can't do anything right. When my friend was reading "The Hunger Games" last year, she told me how much I would love the books and that Katniss reminded her of me. My little sister is like Prim to me. As I was reading the first book I kept thinking about how much I admired Katniss and how I was nothing like her. Now, as I read "Catching Fire," as Katniss struggles with the decisions she has to make, with Peeta and Gale and her family, I feel very connected to her. Yeah, Katniss, I know exactly what it feels like to not be able to do anything right. I will have to say that so far Katniss is one of my favorite literary characters, and I can't wait to see how everything unfolds.