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I don't know how other people feel about this, but I absolutely loathe fiction that is written in the present tense (for example, "Catherine can see a stand of trees behind the house"). I can't forget that I am reading and just lose myself in the story. It feels to me as if I'm hearing somebody discuss the story rather than telling it, and this is even more true now, after writing my critical analysis paper where we had to use what Toffee calls "the literary present tense." So, this was my problem with Granotier's book. It seemed like a critique of what I would call a real novel. All the way through I was debating whether or not I should give up on it, which doesn't make for a fun experience.
Strangely enough, the present-tense thing did not bother me much with The Hunger Games, once I started reading it. It was kind of obvious that Collins was using it because Katniss is the narrator and that meant that telling it in the past tense would eliminate any suspense about whether or not she survives in the end, but I'm not so sure that it would have mattered to most of the people reading it if the book had been in the past tense.
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