The Panem Companion

An Unofficial Guide to Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games, From Mellark Bakery to Mockingjays

By: V. Arrow

Narrated by: Emma Galvin

Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

Go deeper into the home of the Hunger Games with the creator of the best-known fan map of Panem. What does Panem look like? How does Panem define race? How do Panem’s districts reflect the major themes of the trilogy?What allusions to our world are found in Panem names like Finnick, Johanna, Beetee, Cinna, Everdeen, and Mellark? The Panem Companion gives fresh insight into Suzanne Collins’ trilogy by looking at the world of the Hunger Games and the forces that kept its citizens divided since the First Rebellion. With a blend of academic insight and true fan passion, V. Arrow explores how Panem could have evolved from the America we know today and uses textual clues to piece together Panem’s beliefs about class, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, and more.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2012 V. Arrow (P)2014 Audible Inc.

The Narrator was AWFUL

I felt like Siri was reading me a story. She had such a robotic voice and at first she was practically yelling the material. However it got a LITTLE better the more she read. Or maybe I just quit focusing on it and listened more intently on what she was saying instead. Another thing on the narrator is that she pronounced almost every name and place wrong. Why did no one correct her. Has no one ever seen the source material or its pronunciations before? The book itself was good and I found it very interesting. I couldn't follow the geographical stuff since I am a visual learner though. I would have to follow along with a map, so I skipped a lot of that part. I also found the math part to be too over the top. They should have explained the math on one of the years and not repeated it for every year of Hunger Games age.

Good Content; Bad Narration

I enjoyed learning about the fictional history of Panem and how many aspects relates to our real-world, contemporary society. This reference helps to put the Hunger Games novels in context. However, the narrator sounds AI generated and mispronounced a lot of the characters' names. I found this very jarring.

Narrator is annoying

Narrator was annoying that she pronounced names differently through the book. Sometimes it was Madge sometimes Mage. It was like that for most names. She also paused at awkward places.

Horrible Narrator

This was the worst narration I have ever listened to. She was practically yelling. It sounded like she was lecturing us for most of the book. It was very condescending. She also pronounced names wrong...and not even consistently wrong. A few of note: Madge was pronounced Mage for the first half of the book. Plutarch - she switched which syllables had the accent. Beatie - she pronounced Batie for the first half of the book. The written book may have been better
..it was hard to know if the content was any good because the narration was so awful.

What can I say. It was bad.

First off this person/people have way too much time on their hands. The author pushes her political agenda too much. She looks way too much in the Global Warming theory. It is almost way too much.