In 2008, I wrote a defense of Twilight for Guernica Daily. In my defense, I hadn’t read the books at the time, and only the first film had been released. While I won’t renounce my original point (that the books tapped into something teenage girls were lacking in their entertainment choices, i.e. romance over sex), holy moly do I regret anything that may have sounded like endorsement. In the final book of the trilogy, eighteen-year-old Bella Swan skips college because she gets married and knocked up. Would that I were making this up.

Thank the YA gods that a protagonist much more akin to Buffy than Victim #37 has taken center stage with Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy. (Yes, I’ve read them; I learned my lesson.) Katniss Evergreen is a bow-wielding, family-saving hero of the first order. Oh, and the movie looks like terrific fun.

Photograph via Flickr by emilyonasunday.