Mockingjay

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she's made it out of the bloody arena alive, she's still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what's worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss's family, not her friends, not the people of District 12. Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final installment of Suzanne Collins's groundbreaking The Hunger Games trilogy promises to be one of the most talked about books of the year.


I'm glad that I waited a day to write this review, because after completing it last night, I was ready to shred this book (Metaphorically, of course. With my review, not with something that would, ya know, cause damage to my book) After 24 hours of hindsight, I have changed my mind completely. This book is awesome.

One of the things that made me mad last night was the ending. It wasn't nearly happy enough for me. I wanted things to end peachy-keen, like most kids books generally do. I'm a sucker for a happy ending. This book wrapped everything up nicely, but I wasn't satisfied that all was well in the end. However, in hindsight, it's WAY better this way. This ending is not all sunshine and rainbows because it's a book about FREAKIN' WAR! It cannot be expected for everything to be happy after so many people are killed. The devastation and mental and physical pain that people have gone through in this book are tremendous. In real life, people take decades to get over going through similar traumas that these people went through, if they get over them at all. This book really leaves you feeling like I'm sure people with PTSD do. Fabulous ending. Fabulous.

The other interesting thing about my epiphany about the ending is that I just criticized The Weird Sisters about not being realistic enough and it was one of those "peachy-keen" endings. Just took me a day to realize that Mockingjay ended it right. Go figure.

After reading all three of these books, I look back and really appreciate how they were formatted and laid out as a trilogy. The first book was formulating how this corrupt, evil government was running, and how they controlled their citizens. The second shows political unrest and the potential for an uprising, and the third is all out war. Each had it's specific purpose and I thought all of them were done well.

Overall, I think my favourite book in the series is still Catching Fire. The first book was a good stand alone. Had the other two not been written, it would have been good as a single novel. But, as I generally find with first books in a series (Harry Potter included) the first book takes so much time explaining an entire society or doing character development that it doesn't compare well to the other books in the series plotwise. Mockingjay was a great finale book, and the reason I didn't like it quite as much as Catching Fire is because of how I felt reading them. In Catching Fire, I couldn't wait to read what was going to happen next (I phrased it in my review of that one as feeling like I couldn't read fast enough). With Mockingjay, I almost just wanted to skip to the end to see how it finished. I didn't of course, and it's not like the stuff in the middle of that book wasn't important, it was, I was just so anxious to get to the end that I didn't really care what happened before that.

This is a great series that I would recommend to just about anyone. It's a bit dark and violent as a teen series, but it is so compelling and the characters are so great that I think everyone can take something away from it.