Literary merit of catching fire

During my summer reading assignment, I chose to read Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire. The book Catching Fire  did not have much literary merit and was made mostly for commercial purposes. Just like in the book Hunger Games, Catching Fire includes people killing each other in a tournament for survial. Catching Fire was made to take advantage of Americans love of violence and use it to sell many copies of the book. The book Catching Fire differs from the book Hunger Games by including an upcoming revolution in the book. Although many people may think that this makes the story have a deeper meaning and makes the book Catching Fire have literary merit, this is untrue because the Arab Spring was going on during the time this book was being written; people were rebelling all over the middle east, and many Americans were in the mood to read about people struggling against oppressive governments. So Catching Fire tried to imitate the revolutions going on in the middle east during this time by having the people stand up against the central government just like in the middle east. This helped insure that the book would sell and that a sequel would be easily lined up, as a result this book can be clearly seen as just a book made for mostly commercial purposes and a book without much literary merit. Catching Fire had many elements that were taken from other stories including the main character, Katniss Everdeen having two potential love intrests thourghout the book(they were Peeta and Gale), just like in the Twilight series and the main character has an " wise old man" in the novel (named Haymitch), just like in the Harry Potter series. Also, the book Catching Fire  has a character that was thought to be one of the main characters enemy, but turned out to be an ally in disguise (he was Finnik); this is clearly an imitation of Proffesor Snape's role in the Harry Potter series, because throughout the series Snape appeared a villian but was a " good guy".  These points clearly shows that the book is taking elements from popular series including Harry Potter and Twilight and incorporating it in its own plot, to try to sell as many books as possible, which makes the book Catching Fire  not have much literary merit and makes the book seem to be a commercial fiction book.