Winter's Bone and The Hunger Games

We are reading The Hunger Games trilogy (now into the third book). In this case it is actually Listening, not reading, because they are from Audible.  A book that is read to you gives you an entirely different connection to the story and a good reader will help you stretch your imagination as you visualize the characters and the scene.  These books are considered "Young Adult" but it confuses me as to why they aren't considered Adult books. Yes, the main character is a teenage girl but so what? The theme of the books is heavy-duty morality, the future, death, violence, manipulation, deceit and so on. The movie (of course) is being shot now and Jennifer Lawrence is the main character, Katniss.

So how does this tie in with the movie Winter's Bone? Jennifer Lawrence (shown above) was the lead actor in this movie and her performance was achingly, hauntingly perfect. A good movie is one that has you thinking about it the next day, mulling over the scenes and wondering about the characters. In this movie it was very interesting to realize at the end that the strongest characters, in terms of how they faced life and dealt with hardship, were the women, not the men. Recently we watched The King's Speech and gave that a five-star rating. Winter's Bone gets six stars.

How does that all tie in with the picture of the antler pieces at the top? They came from Kervin, my barber. He hunts a lot and does a lot of gardening, too.  In The Hunger Games they hunt game for food, in Winter's Bone they hunt game for food.  You may think hunting animals is a bad thing but consider the fact that in Austin our local Caritas organization accepts venison donations from hunters and uses it to provide food to families in need.

The antler pieces are in the process of being worked into some ceramic sculptures - or at least that's the plan.