My girls and I both liked the Hunger Games series for the first two books and found the third book very disappointing. The characters kind of went off in directions that didn't seem to be supported by their earlier behavior. It is violent, but not something that I worried about terribly in that it is the type of violence that isn't something my kids are likely to see in the real world.
I worried a lot more when dd13 read The Lovely Bones when she was something like 11 or so b/c the main character is raped and murdered and was about the same age as my dd. That seemed more real and, had I read it first and realized that, I probably would have tried to direct dd away from it.
My youngest is enjoying a book called Reswyt on her Nook right now, but I haven't read it so I really don't know much about it.
