Too Young for Hunger Games? Enter the Underland.

One repeated theme I've been hearing during all of this mania over The Hunger Games is when is it a good time to start reading them. As usual, the correct parenting answer is: It depends. Obviously you know your child's maturity level, ability to handle difficult subject matter, and tolerance for smoochy parts. When my 10-year-old niece called me to ask me about *The Hunger Games, *the book being read by most of her fifth grade class, I strongly discouraged her from reading it. It's not so much the violence, though that played a part in my recommendation, but it's also the complexity of the subject matter -- if she could just wait a couple more years it would be so much more meaningful.

Good news, though. Prior to writing The Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins penned another fantastic series, *The Underland Chronicles, *written for middle grade readers. I was a fan of those books prior to picking up The Hunger Games, which felt like a graduation into more mature YA territory.

The first book in the five-part Underland Chronicles is* Gregor The Overlander*. Gregor is an 11-year-old boy who falls through the grate in the laundry room of his New York City apartment building to find himself in a strange new world below. (New Yorkers, you know what I’m talking about here… who hasn’t slipped through a grate into a creepy subterranean world?)

Gregor finds himself in the Underland city of Regalia, where the humans have translucent skin and lavender eyes. Gregor soon meets a host of other species, large animals that have different roles in the Underland. There are fliers (bats), gnawers (rats), and crawlers (cockroaches) among others. Gregor soon learns that Bartholomew of Sandwich, an explorer who founded the human colony in the Underland, wrote a series of prophecies in which Gregor (“The Warrior”) has the starring role. Gregor reluctantly goes on great, dangerous journeys, and each book in the series fulfills one of the prophecies.

Like *The Hunger Games, *this series tackles very serious topics like war and racism using great mythology and storytelling. You see, the humans and bats have a special bond. The rats and the humans hate each other and are perpetually on the verge of war. And no one has any respect for the crawlers. Gregor must navigate all of this, helping to keep peace in the Underland. It's a compelling precursor to discovering the atrocities of the Capitol.

GeekMom Kate recommended *The Underland Chronicles *as a series to read after Harry Potter. And maybe that's the perfect spot, the transition between Harry and Katniss.