Amy is the one who requested this one. She'd read it with her granddaughters, and been deeply disturbed by the premise, of children being force to kill each other, and wanted to hear what other adults thought of the book. Collins has stated that she was writing about war, trying to view it through a child's eyes, but it could just as well be an allegory about adolescence, and the seemingly life and death decisions that are made in middle school. We wandered from this book to other recent YA novels, like the Harry Potter and Twilight books. There had been a line out the door when each shipment of Harry Potter books came in, and the library had had to set up a separate staging area to hand out the holds.