The Underland Chronicles by Suzanne Collins

This is what I’ve read so far:

Number One

Number Two

Number Three

My journey to the Underland with Gregor got its start in another book, namely Suzanne Collins’ incredibly deft and shrewd Hunger Games.  In Hunger Games, a Young Adult Fantasy story, Collins relates the thrilling, clever, and highly enthralling experience of the protagonist Katniss Everdeen in a life or death arena known as the Hunger Games.  I could go on ad nauseum about this trilogy (the second one Catching Fire comes out next month!), but I’ll just let you read Grace Wallace’s blog on it here.

Well, after Hunger Games was spread around Lemurian employees, one of us, namely Emily, wanted to read other works by Collins, namely the first book in the Underland Chronicles Gregor the Overlander.  And then, well, I stole it from her!

I was hooked by the very first couple of pages (the time it took Collins to establish her setting and main character Gregor).  And I wasn’t hooked in a bad-for-you-addictive kind of way that some books are designed to have over their readers but rather I was drawn near to Gregor’s world and sympathies in a straightforward and empathic manner.  I found myself admiring, respecting, and wanting to learn more about Gregor, an eleven-year-old kid with adult concerns.  Add in the fantasy factor of a secret civilization existing beneath the layers of earth that separate it from the Overland of New York City and, if you’ve read any of my other blogs, I was “in”- even to the point of feeling sadness over a tragedy involving a giant cockroach!!  (That, my friends, is the genius of Collins’ writing! infusing gritty and harsh, unpleasant worlds with feeling, sacrifice, and relational warmth.)

Collins combines an emotionally intelligent and astute kid with other complex characters as well as the fantastical element of giant talking, equally complex warm-blooded and cold-blooded creatures amidst a hostile terrain to create a world that pulses with vibrancy, darkness, and light.  This narrative conveys frank portrayals of combat (as Collins does in Hunger Games) that grotesquely entertain the senses even as the relational interactions within the story gently provoke the deeper waters of human sensibility and psyche.

Gregor lives with his mom, ailing grandma, seven-year-old sister Lizzie and two-year-old sister Margaret (Boots is her nickname) in a small apartment in the Big Apple.  Gregor’s dad has been missing for over two years now.  With his income gone, the family is struggling to get by and Gregor does all he can to help, like not going to camp and instead staying home to babysit his sisters.  Gregor and Boots go to do some laundry in the old building’s laundry room,  and like Alice and the rabbit hole, Boots falls down a laundry shaft chasing a toy.  What can Gregor do but go after his sister?  Down, down, down they go (I won’t tell you how it is they survive the fall) into the Underland, full of crawlers (cockroaches), gnawers (rats), fliers (bats), cutters (ants), nibblers (mice), and hissers (lizards), among other creatures I’m sure Collins will reveal in books 4 and 5–all of which are huge! talking groups of animals that are either in alliance with the humans in the Underland (such as the fliers) or are viciously fighting against them (such as the gnawers).  It is here that prophecies are revealed and quests are begun.  People (ahem, salient creatures I should say) you thought were friends turn out to be enemies and enemies can be friends.

The politics are strange, ferocious and precarious–ultimately deciding the fate of all in the Underland.  As I make my way into the fourth book (Gregor and the Marks of Secret), I am finding this out more and more.  It’s a lively bunch down there!  Recommended for ages 11 and up.  Hunger Games recommended for ages 14 and up.