I believe the phrase I'm looking for is REALLY late to the bandwagon. Okay, so I read this book because I had someone managed NOT to be spoiled for it so far and recognized that the odds of that state continuing are so small, I had better read it if I was ever going to.
Of course, it suffered from being THE hyped up book of the year and so I was...well, honestly, I was expecting it not to live up to the hype. I just wondered whether it would be pretty good or awful.
Pretty good, as it turns out. I liked the premise and I have a soft spot for this post-apocalyptic/dystopic young adult fiction. The book's main virtue and failing were, oddly enough, one and the same: an absence of reality. Katniss and her world and her experiences felt unreal; I didn't believe in her as a character or that her experiences were really happening to her. Everything felt as though it was coming through a wad of cotton.
Of course, that made the gory bits palatable and made Katniss a sort of every-girl for the reader to impose herself into and imagine being there. Because Katniss never puts her own stamp on her experiences, they feel unmediated and because Collins never makes you feel like you're there, the horror of the book is mitigated, leaving the (cotton swatched) drama and excitement and experience. It's kept at a distance and safe.
Anyway, I'm glad I read it and I'll definitely read the rest of it. I just can't help wondering what the relationship between the empty main character and the bestseller is...