Mockingjay

Author: Suzanne Collins

Age: YA

This is the third and final book in the Hunger Games trilogy. If you haven't already read The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, don't read this review! There may be spoilers!

This book, like the other two, was very vivid. I finished it Sunday evening, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I dreamed about it that night and I woke up thinking about it the next morning. If you've read the first two, which you should have, then you know what they're like...exciting, entertaining, thrilling. It's more of the same. Some people have said that it's slower than the first two, and maybe it is at the beginning, but with these books "slow" is a relative term, and it certainly doesn't equate to "boring." And the finale is as heart-racing and un-put-downable as ever. I have come up with a cunning plan, and it is this: I am going to make my husband read these books, and then when he gets down to the last 60 pages or so I am going to start nagging him incessantly about making dinner. 

When the book opens, Katniss is in District Thirteen, where the local government wants her to become the face of the rebellion. She has mixed feelings about this, and she's not sure who to trust. Meanwhile, Peeta is still in the hands of the Capitol, and they're trying to use him against her. Et cetera, et cetera, lots of things blow up. I really enjoyed this trilogy. I felt like every book contributed to the story and there was very little of the filler that you get in some trilogies--you know, the kind where the second book just seems absolutely useless.

I really like Katniss. She's heroic, but she's not a superhero. In fact, she seems to spend most of this book in the hospital, recovering from various adventures. This isn't one of those stories where someone gets shot in a battle scene but they wrap a t-shirt around it and grit their teeth and fight through the pain, and then the next time you see them they're totally fine and if someone mentions it they're all "Oh yeah, haha, I got shot. How silly!" Actions have consequences in this story. And that makes it more...realistic, I guess...at least inasmuch as a sci-fi adventure story can be. Also, it makes you see how much their cause really means to them, and how far they're willing to go for it.

I like all of Katniss's conflictedness, too. She's so self-doubting and self-deprecating. Kind of like Bella Swan, except with Bella it's the sort of self-doubt that comes from not really thinking very much of your self, for no real reason other than that you're a teenage girl, and wondering what on earth any boy--let alone a boy you really like because you can see how fantastic he is--would see in you. And that's okay; in my opinion it's believable because I've been there. But with Katniss it's more complex than that. What she doesn't like about herself is that she's KILLED PEOPLE. A LOT of people. But at the same time, when she wonders what all these gorgeous boys see in her, well, we readers know what they see in her. She's actually a really good person who does awesome things all the time. I think she's what we all secretly hope we are when we're having our own self-doubting moments. Silly of us, isn't it, to sit there and think to ourselves, "Gosh, I really suck," but then behind that we're thinking, "I bet I only think I do but I'm actually really cool. Just like Katniss." Or maybe that's just me.

Like the other books, this book also has the whole "controlling the media = controlling the world" motif, only this time it's more about news stories than reality TV shows. I think about that sometimes. Everything we get from the media about politics seems to be SO much one extreme or the other that I wonder if any of it is real at all, if our government is really doing or not doing anything they say they are, or if they're actually doing something completely different and having a good laugh at us.

The other thing I mused about while reading it was the strange situation in which Katniss finds herself, where she's surrounded by all these other people whose sole aim is to keep her alive, even if they have to give their own lives for it. I've always thought that would be really weird. You know, to be the president of a country or something and have all these bodyguards, all these people who exist just to take a bullet for you. I mean, what makes one person's life more valuable than another's? Does anyone really believe that they, single-handedly, are the only ones who can run everything and fix the world's problems, that no one else could step up and take their place and do an okay job, if they needed to? I guess it's an especially weird thing to think about in the U.S., where we change our leadership every 4-8 years anyway. But after reading this book I think I understand it better. Some people and some positions have symbolic value that may be completely unrelated to capability, but is still actually a really big deal.

Oh, one other thing I wanted to talk about. The romance thing. I just don't get the standard literary contrivance in which a girl is always finding herself having to choose between two, or more, gorgeous men. Does this really happen to anyone ever? If so, I would like to hear about it. I've always felt lucky just to have one guy at a time who was into me. But I guess it works as far as making a story more interesting. We've got this (sort of silly) idea in our entertainment culture that the only part of a love story that's entertaining is the part BEFORE the characters are for sure in love with each other. After that, I guess it's all just toilet seats up and down and lids on toothpaste, or something. Because dating people or married people NEVER have any real conflict ever again. Uh-huh. But anyway, that's how it's supposed to work in books and TV shows, so the hard part for writers who write for longer than one book or one season is how to keep two people perpetually in the state of a not fully defined relationship. And what Collins does with Katniss and Peeta in Book Three is certainly an interesting and unusual twist. That's all I'll say.

Those are my musings. If you've read the first two, you're dying to read this book anyway. I don't have to tell you to. If you haven't started the trilogy yet, well, you're not supposed to be reading this review. But just in case...you should read them. They're well-written, the characters are interesting, and the stories will both entertain you and make you think.

See my The Hunger Games review for book recommendations.