Mockingjay by Suzzane Colins

The third installment of the Hunger Games trilogy follows Katniss Everdeen as she is transformed from a child contestant in a macabre televised death match to a soldier and the face of a rebellion. This book takes a drastically different tone from the first two books. The Hunger Games are a romantic metaphor compared to this militaristic war drama. It gets heavy. This book was needed to spell out any lingering analogies, and the social agenda of the Hunger Games finally comes to light

The tone of this book was different from the first two of the trilogy. Katniss and Peeta are separated in the first half, and the book suffers for it. The book loses a lot of its warmth as the effervescent Peeta is held offscreen and tortured. The Gale-Katniss (Gatniss?) relationship gets room to breath, but it has surprisingly little chemistry for a book for this genre. I just don't believe the love triangle. She was never meant to be with Gale, was she?

On a lighter note, here is a photoshop powered illustration of my favorite scene. Bringing down any aircraft with a bow and arrow is ludicrous to me.

A lot of criticism I am reading about the book is how Collins is talking down to her readers in this book more than the others.  I agree with other reviewers that some of the smaller analogies were explained a little too thoroughly. The crazy cat game analogy dragged on excruciatingly long even if it was just a few paragraphs.  I had to set the book down for a breather because of that one. Also the Katniss's fathers song was brought up and re-explained time after time like a dead horse. I can see how even young adults can find that level of explanation condescending.

On the other hand, she finally reveals what the symbolism behind the Hunger Games actually are. This throws a wrench in my co-workers insight on the FEMA camps and reality television caused voyeurism.  It is about war. She drove the point home by making it clear from the beginning that not even the rebels are the good guys, that Katniss can't trust anyone  to be good and pure. President Coin was as cold and as opportunistic as President Snow. That is the whole reason the book was so unpleasant. In war, there is no good guy, and everyone suffers in the end. Collins likens war to the hunger games, in which we watch our children fight eachother to the death for pleasure, and a way to ingrain hatred into our culture.

Other Notes
- I disagree with the LA times book review about Mockingjay settling the love triangle. There was never ever any passion between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale, and Katniss just stayed with who ever stayed around the longest. They DID come to the same conclusion about the strong antiwar undercurrents of this book, however

Trilogy Reviews
Read Review for The Hunger Games (Hunger Game Series #1)
Read Review for Catching Fire (Hunger Games Series #2)
Read Review for Mockingjay (Hunger  Games Series #3)

Catching Fire by Suzanne Colins

Catching Fire is the sequel to the Hunger Games by Suzanne Colins. It was nice to read a sequel that wasn't a lame afterthought to the original. I haven't finished the third book in the series yet, but I think a trilogy is a bit of a stretch.

Catching Fire is about the fallout after Katniss and Petta's rebellious win in the 74th hunger games. To their dismay, they find that the 75th Hunger Games will draw from the existing pool of winners, and Katniss and Petta find themselves back in the arena.

The pacing was odd. More than half of the book took place in District 12 and the tension around the love triangle between Katniss, Petta, and Gale. The climax of the book didn't address the love triangle or even the tension caused by the Capitol. It simply marked the end of the second round of Hunger Games. In this respect, I suspect that the third book will act as the second half of this one. I know that there is a lot of pressure for science fiction writers to pump out trilogies, but they shouldn't let the pacing suffer like this.

Being a fan of romance, I fell head over heels by the love triangle. The thing that separates this from Twilight is that Katniss could care less about who she falls in love with. She acts like a distracted 16 year old and fails to understand herself emotionally. She just doesn't grasp the responsibility of not leading these boys on. This characterization is spot on. I am tired of reading books about kids where they act and think like short adults. Katniss will end up with who ever is alive at the end of the day, and this is quite refreshing.

What wasn't as refreshing was how acutely aware I was of the female authorship. I love and support female authors, but I felt like some of her detailing about the characters and the culture were only something women would notice. Sure she mentions food and speech, but she goes into a disproportionate amount of detail into manicures and waxing. The detailing is sparse overall, and the light hand of a female perspective was made too obvious.

I feel as though I only read half of a book this week. No one ever reads just Catching Fire, and its the trilogy or nothing. Look forward to my review next week on the final book in the trilogy, Mockingjay.


Trilogy Reviews
Read Review for The Hunger Games (Hunger Game Series #1)
Read Review for Catching Fire (Hunger Games Series #2)
Read Review for Mockingjay (Hunger  Games Series #3)

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I bought my copy of the Hunger Games at target for $7.19. After the first few chapters I worried I accidentally bought the dumbed-down discount version. Perhaps that acute sense of an overly pedagogic tone was my fault. I shouldn't be so quick to judge a book meant for the YA audience.  In that respect, the book performed wonderfully, almost brilliantly, as it laid out a story just gruesome enough to be fascinating, and just angsty enough to be relatable by someone who is just about to grow out of it.

 I am sure you know what the Hunger Games is about by now. The movie had the third highest grossing movie of all time. The book takes place in a far future when North America has been rearranged by a civil war into a Capitol and 12 outlying districts that support it. The districts are poor and the Capitol works hard to suppress them. One of their suppression tools is something called the Hunger Games, a romanesque game where 24 children have to fight to the death while the whole country watches.


I can see why teenagers go gaga over this stuff. Adults see the hunger games as a metaphor for the voyeurism that is our media, but I can tell the analogy hits a lot closer to home. The book is all about being watched, and the attempt to behave accordingly while you know that everyone around you is your potential enemy. That sounds a lot like MY high school, at least.

The movie missed surprisingly few things. One of which was Katniss's personal growth. She started the book with the assurance that she was a powerful young woman by the ability to support her family. She ended the book with the realization that sometimes she didn't understand her own feelings. The other thing the movie left out, quite  brilliantly I might add, was the last 40 pages of the book. The last 40 pages of the book acted as a segue to what I believe will be the drama in the second book. It would look silly in the last 10 minutes of the movie if they never made another one. The last 40 pages were about were where you realize that in the arena you at least that there were rules. There is no telling what can happen outside of the arena, when you don't have the assurance of a caring audience to keep things humane.

A notes on onw the books potential flaws. I don't understand her relationship with Cinna. That was one of the things I was looking forward to understanding after watching the movie. They seem to have such a deep and loving relationship without apparently having ever having anything to bind them together.

Overall it was quite fun to be wrapped up in the popular fiction hype. I look forward to my review of the second book in the trilogy, Catching Fire.


Trilogy Reviews
Read Review for The Hunger Games (Hunger Game Series #1)
Read Review for Catching Fire (Hunger Games Series #2)
Read Review for Mockingjay (Hunger  Games Series #3)