What Is It About The Hunger Games?

I tried to read at home. I saw the dust on the piano. The fingerprints on the window. I heard the dryer finish. The door bell rang. Endless distractions, that distracted me from reading! I devised a brilliant strategy...I would read while exercising at the gym. I go faithfully, 5 times a week, at a time when the gym is least crowded and I can use a cardio machine for 70 minutes. And read. So happily! In the past 2 months I have read Uncle Toms Cabin, Catholicism, Jane Austin, The Lives of The Saints.  I am very happy with the arrangement. I smile and wave to the other people in the gym, they smile and nod back, we say how are you? we say good how are you? and I happily open my book and read. Loving everything about this! Well, my youngest son is bookish like me. But he is not bothered one bit by the dust and reads books at an incredible pace, going through one book after another. He wants to read The Hunger Games. In our house we try to shelter our kids as much as possible from the world. We try. They watch less than an hour of TV a week! and have never seen stuff like MTV, it's blocked. The Internet has so many parental controls sometimes even simple searches are hindered. We research movies before they watch them and also controversial books. When we read the reviews for The Hunger Games, most of the recommendations were against young children reading it. I had to read the book myself to decide. So yesterday, I got on the same EFX machine I got on 3 other days this week and opened The Hunger Games. A friend of a friend I met at a party last Saturday came up to tell me about how much she loved this book, all 3 books in fact.   My husbands basketball buddy came up to tell me how he read this book on a plane, an old play group mom came to tell me how her sons pipe broke and when she read the books, a woman I never said one word to came up to me and told me how in her native India she only read British books so this book was different for her, my husbands partner told me how his wife read the book while doing a missionary trip in Haiti.  This was the strangest thing!  All totaled 8 different people came up to tell me about their experiences with The Hunger Games. None of these same people said more than a few words to me while I was reading all my other books. And now all of a sudden they want book club discussions. So strange! I could not explain this herd behavior and thought about it all night....what is it about The Hunger Games?