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Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games)

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This was a brilliant conclusion to the trilogy. I can only compare it to "Ender's Game" - and that is extremely high praise, indeed.

When I first closed the book last night, I felt shattered, empty, and drained.

And that was the point, I think. I'm glad I waited to review the book because I'm not sure what my review would have been.

For the first two books, I think most of us readers have all been laboring under the assumption that Katniss Everdeen would eventually choose one of the two terrific men in her life: Gale, her childhood companion or Peeta, the one who accompanied her to the Hunger Games twice. She'd pick one of them and live happily ever after with him, surrounded by friends and family. Somehow, along the way, Katniss would get rid of the awful President Snow and stop the evil Hunger Games. How one teenage girl would do all that, we weren't too sure, but we all had faith and hope that she would.

"Mockingjay" relentlessly strips aside those feelings of faith and hope - much as District 13 must have done to Katniss. Katniss realizes that she is just as much a pawn for District 13 as she ever was for the Colony and that evil can exist in places outside of the Colony.

And that's when the reader realizes that this will be a very different journey. And that maybe the first two books were a setup for a very different ride. That, at its heart, this wasn't a story about Katniss making her romantic decisions set against a backdrop of war.

This is a story of war. And what it means to be a volunteer and yet still be a pawn. We have an entirely volunteer military now that is spread entirely too thin for the tasks we ask of it. The burden we place upon it is great. And at the end of the day, when the personal war is over for each of them, each is left alone to pick up the pieces as best he/she can.

For some, like Peeta, it means hanging onto the back of a chair until the voices in his head stop and he's safe to be around again. Each copes in the best way he can. We ask - no, demand - incredible things of our men and women in arms, and then relegate them to the sidelines afterwards because we don't want to be reminded of the things they did in battle. What do you do with people who are trained to kill when they come back home? And what if there's no real home to come back to - if, heaven forbid, the war is fought in your own home? We need our soldiers when we need them, but they make us uncomfortable when the fighting stops.

All of that is bigger than a love story - than Peeta or Gale. And yet, Katniss' war does come to an end. And she does have to pick up the pieces of her life and figure out where to go at the end. So she does make a choice. But compared to the tragedy of everything that comes before it, it doesn't seem "enough". And I think that's the point. That once you've been to hell and lost so much, your life will never be the same. Katniss will never be the same. For a large part of this book, we see Katniss acting in a way that we can only see as being combat-stress or PTSD-related - running and hiding in closets. This isn't our Katniss, this isn't our warrior girl.

But this is what makes it so much more realistic, I think. Some may see this as a failing in plot - that Katniss is suddenly acting out of character. But as someone who has been around very strong soldiers returning home from deployments, this story, more than the other two, made Katniss come alive for me in a much more believable way.

I realize many out there will hate the epilogue and find it trite. At first, I did too. But in retrospect, it really was perfect. Katniss gave her life already - back when she volunteered for Prim in "The Hunger Games". It's just that she actually physically kept living.

The HBO miniseries, "Band of Brothers", has a quote that sums this up perfectly. When Captain Spiers says, "The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse. All war depends upon it."

But how do you go from that, to living again in society? You really don't. So I'm not sure Katniss ever really did - live again. She just ... kept going. And there's not really much to celebrate in that. Seeing someone keep going, despite being asked - no, demanded - to do unconscionably horrifying things, and then being relegated to the fringes of society, and then to keep going - to pick up the pieces and keep on going, there is something fine and admirable and infinitely sad and pure and noble about that. But the fact is, it should never happen in the first place.

And that was the point, I think.

To start I am a 47 year old Veteran.
I have read a lot of the bad reviews for this last book and I see a theme running through them all. They didn't get their fairytale ending and the people they liked didn't end up the way they wanted. Well If you are looking for a fairytale read Harry Potter. If you want a realistic book on how war really is and how people will sacrifice themselves to save their country, then this is for you.
The love triangle between the three main characters resolves itself in the best way that I could see possible. The way each one would react to the horrors of war were obvious from book one. I don't want to include spoilers so Ill just say, read this with an expectation of a realistic portrayal of the characters and how the war would change them. The ending on a personal level, is not necessarily a happy one, but it is a realistic one. From a "Big Picture" perspective I think it was a happy ending. To expect that all of the main characters could live "Happily Ever After" after surviving what happened in all three books is unrealistic.

Like other reviewers, I could not wait for this book to come out. I am not a particular fan of science fiction but "The Hunger Games" and "Catching Fire" were possibly two of the best books I have read in a long time. I felt the writer fully pulled me into the world of Panem, and I genuinely cared about all the characters. I started reading "Mockingjay" the moment it came in the mail (I pre-ordered it), and was fully engrossed immediately. Then I suddenly began to realize that the author did not really seem to know how to write this book, and it started to feel incredibly disjointed. Where in the previous books I felt as if I knew the characters and really liked many of them despite (and maybe because of) their flaws, in this book I began to dislike everyone, including Katniss. It seems as if the author became confused between the statement she wanted to make ("War is wrong no matter what"), and good storytelling. Peeta, Gale, Katniss, Haymitch etc. took on a paper doll quality and I many times became confused as to what was going on. The book dragged on and then ended in a rush with no insight into why the characters behaved the way they did. I was particularly disappointed in the portrayal of Peeta. Where he was a large part of the previous books, he is but a brief part of this book; like he was an actor that asked for too much money so she wrote him out of the plot!

All in all, I felt betrayed by Suzanne Collins. I wish she would have stayed true to the characters, and given us a book to treasure, a trilogy to read over and over. Instead, I just want to write my own end to the story.

First, I want to establish that I adored the first two books--I've read them multiple times and recommended them constantly at the bookstore where I work; I read them aloud to my husband, gave them to friends and relatives, and I've looked forward to Mockingjay's release for MONTHS! Once I got the book I didn't read it for several days--a little silly, but I realized I didn't want the story to end.

I should have kept to that instinct, because I have finished the book and now I just feel sick. I don't want to own it and I don't think I'll ever re-read it.

It wasn't even well-written! I don't say this off the cuff--it wouldn't be fair to criticize the book this way simply because I didn't like the ending--but it's true, and here's why:



**********SPOILER ALERT*********SPOILER ALERT***********SPOILER ALERT***********



It was predictable and contrived. Collins created lots of expendable characters (Hi there, Team 451!) and then spent most of the book killing them off. It reminded me of the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, where characters whose names you don't know are being killed left and right so you know this is SERIOUS without having to lose a major character--it's a cheap trick, and I expected better of Collins. And cheating like this doesn't actually work; it was so unlikely that she was going to kill off Katniss, Gale or Peeta in the middle of the book that it didn't really create the suspense she was going for. Prim's death (and Finnick's) could have been used much more thoughtfully; instead we had a blitzkrieg of constant attrition to remind us that THIS IS WAR. It wasn't evocative--it just made me feel numb.

This endless dying is interspersed with even-more-endless strategy and technical details. I repeatedly found myself skimming, which never happened with the previous two books. But these passages were so boring(!), and I kept hoping to find that Katniss had figured out a purpose or an orientation or had reached out to Peeta or even just accurately assessed something--but no luck.

Which brings me to character development, relationships, and philosophical reflections on values and motivations. They were vital in the previous two books, but they are nearly nonexistent here, and the book is fatally flawed because of it. Peeta is barely present, and if you discount the time that Katniss spends crying in corners, injured and in the hospital, taking morphling, or being manipulated or controlled by others and wandering around confused, she isn't really present either. And Gale is unfairly characterized in order to resolve the love triangle--it's baffling, because Katniss of all people isn't in a moral position to judge Gale, and I thought that was part of the point.

Ultimately, the story is hijacked--hey, that's a good metaphor!--by anti-war propaganda and a damn-near nihilistic outlook. I understand that Collins wanted to communicate that war and violence aren't glamorous. I think she's right. But (ironically) she's done real violence to her characters and the merit in the world she created in order to bludgeon us with that value.

In a way, you could call this book "more realistic". And yet--I think a book that accurately reflects the gritty horrors of war would show how people use dark humor as a coping mechanism. This book had none of the wry humor of the previous two.

And for pity's sake, what was Collins trying to achieve with the ending? I agree with those who say that Katniss agreed to a renewed Hunger Games featuring the children of Capitol citizens in order to get the opportunity to stop Coin--it's the only thing that makes sense, given what Collins is clearly trying to convey, and it fits best with the character of Katniss. But it's not made explicit in the text. Leaving this up to conjecture was a major error on Collins' part, or very bad editing. It's not wise to be subtle in the philosophical part of the book that is meant to put the heavy-handed part into some kind of context.

And the last four pages, where we finally learn: Peeta or Gale? An afterthought. I think what is worst is that by making this choice, Collins makes the war the only important part, the only real part of Katniss's life--all the rest calls for is a brief summary. Almost all injury, very little road to recovery (those "real or not real" conversations were one of the few highlights of the book). It's baffling to me that this tacked-on ending is still fairy-tale-esque (that is, Katniss did settle down with her True Love and have children). But why bother giving her this semblance of a fairy-tale ending when it's so clear that she's DEAD INSIDE? It could have been insightfully ironic--though that's a little sick--but it's not. It's just empty. Apparently, once you've been in a war, nothing--not even consummation of true love or the birth of your children--can bring you joy ever again.

I think the vital counterpart to accurately portraying the horror and corruption of war is the possibility of redemption, of pursuing redemption. And Collins set this up but didn't follow through. Both personally and politically, through all of 'Mockingjay' Katniss is reduced to this calculating, empty creature. Her reflections on putting those she loves before herself (as she does with Prim in the first book, and Peeta in the second)--her major arc as a dynamic character? Utterly gone here. She makes, what, TWO efforts to reach out to Peeta? Three? She realizes she should be doing better but makes barely any effort to do so. I suppose it could be argued that the war left her no time--though her repeated willingness to kill Peeta to save her own skin blights that rather--but afterwards? There's no mention of her interest in making it up to him. Even when she later has leisure as a wife and parent, post-war, to reflect on these things, she doesn't. Politically, too, she never finds a motivation--such as "a world where Peeta's child can be safe"--to sustain her. Her own survival (as Gale bitterly notes) seems to be her top priority--though hell, she's not even sure she wants that; she seems a lot more concerned that her death be a quick one. Great. Katniss is Everyman--a broken, broken Everyman. For pity's sake, I'm tired of the GROWNUP literature that shows us the depth to which the human spirit can sink--I don't need it here! The main perk of young adult literature is that you can have both good writing AND a hero who can inspire you by example to rise above and triumph. To my mind, the purpose of good YA lit is to explore dark topics in a meaningful, well-written way that doesn't leave you in a bog of existential misery. If this is the brave new world into which young adult literature is heading, let me say now that I want no part of it. I can re-read '1984' and 'The Road'--or pick up 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?'--anytime I want. In fact, the former are fine examples of how a book can be serious, gritty, and disturbing, and still satisfying. But if you're going to make someone sit through this near-nihilism, essentially conveying that neither individuals or humanity as a whole can never really change, they deserve capital-L Literature for their trouble.

I just wish I could go back and warn myself not to read this. I've never been interested in fanfiction but I think I'm almost willing to look some up, if only to get the taste of this out of my mouth.

Let me begin by saying I adored the first two books. I've been waiting eagerly for months for Mockingjay, and now that I've read it I'm disturbed and disappointed. This book casts a pall over the first two, and much as I loved them I don't know that I can read them again now that I know how the characters end up. Mockingjay goes in a completely different direction than books 1 and 2, but it's a direction no wise author should have taken.

SPOILER ALERT

In the first two Hunger Games books, it was always worth giving your life if it could make life better for those who come after you. In Mockingjay, people--good, kind people whom we knew for hundreds of pages and loved like friends--die left and right IN VAIN. Katniss's mission to kill Snow ends with most of her friends dead (in horrible ways) and Snow still alive. Snow eventually dies and Panem is free--but life's not a whole lot better than it was. Peeta, whom I think everyone loved (I know I did), becomes a monster who's been stripped of the sweet, devoted love he had for Katniss, which is what made him so completely charming in the earlier books. Katniss is impatient with him, cruel to him, and at several points coldly considers putting an arrow through his brain, which doesn't ring true given their relationship in books 1 and 2. He recovers some, and marries Katniss (who doesn't seem terribly excited about that), but HE'S NEVER THE SAME. She's never the same. She's estranged from Gale, and her mother, and Prim's dead. (I couldn't believe this; I kept turning pages thinking it had to be a terrible mistake, Collins couldn't be foolish enough to destroy the last pure, good person in Panem.) The final point of the book seems to be, "Well, life sucks, but it could be worse." Yeah, thanks, I'm so glad I read 900 pages to come to that conclusion.

The book feels rushed, and there are many passages that are unclear. For instance, why does Katniss vote in favor of a 76th Hunger Games? Does she really want revenge for Prim, or does she just want Coin to trust her enough to let her onto the platform? Was she thinking of killing Coin at that point, or was it an impulse she got later? This is crucial information that says volumes about Katniss's character, and IT SHOULDN'T BE SO VAGUE. I'm all for subtlety, but not for downright obscurity.

Ultimately, I FEEL BETRAYED. The first two books were wonderful, but they'll never be the same now that we know the grim, depressing fate to which Collins condemns her characters (those she doesn't kill off, that is). Mockingjay is dark and disturbing, with no redemption for the characters or reward for the readers. War is an atrocity, life can be terrible--we know that. That's why fiction exists: to be different. To tell stories, not to send messages. I would rather have been left hanging after Catching Fire and never have known what happened in what was one of my all-time favorite stories than to have it end like this.

I found the entire story to be very sloppily written.

In some ways, yes, I agree that this story is a war-story, and some of the scenes were rather poignant and helped invoked the theme that yes, war really really sucks. There's no doubt about it.

However, I don't think this was great literature. Actually, comparing it to Twilight, with such scenes as the "let's talk about who the girl is going to pick while she's asleep" and the fact that whenever a major event occurs Katniss is conveniently in the hospital or unconscious and needs to be told about it later (whatever happened to show, not tell, Collins?), is not that far of a stretch. The characters that we fell in love with throughout the series, the reason the Hunger Games was wildly popular in the first place, were mysteriously missing the entire last book. Katniss was hollow and dead, Peeta was absent and even absent when he was there, Gale STILL had no personality, and Haymitch lost his sarcasm and spunk. I'm serious about Gale: whenever he talked or ranted about the Capital, it was like Katniss pulled a switch, refusing to let the reader understand this character at all. And Haymitch, while in the first books he seemed to have his hand in all the cookie jars, in the last book he was strangely uninvolved in the entire scheme to take over the Capital. All of them were "there" by name, but not by personality. What was the point of having them there if none of us could recognize them? Why not just write an entirely new book with new character names to apply to these misfits? It didn't fit at all. And, yes, there is nothing wrong with having characters who are affected by the horrors of war. I was actually impressed at the beginning by how Collins developed that sense of hopelessness. However, these were no longer the characters we fell in love with, nor did they share the relationship dynamics of the first two books.

The pacing was also off completely. There was no real build-up, nothing was accomplished, and it just sort of sputtered off into nothingness at the end. I understand that this is supposedly "realistic", but at the same time it was just too dull and it dragged. Collins is a great action writer, there was no reason it should have had been that way. There are plenty of books that show the destitution and hopelessness of war without dragging, so you can't tell me that there are no other ways to present this other than what Collins gave us. Prim and Finnick died without a moment's thought or a chance to grieve, and we know this is not how Collins usually writes it, just based on how she presents Rue's death in the first book. And then to lead us on, for pages and pages filled with character deaths and confusing horrors (I can't be the only one who failed to understand the setup of the Capitals and the bizarre pods) only for Katniss to just pass out again with nothing accomplished. It was like, thanks Collins, for a completely pointless drag of action for no reason whatsoever. At least the first two books you gave us had action scenes that actually meant something to the overall plot structure.

So, just overall, it was rather sloppy. Poorly paced, poorly written, characters forgotten or abandoned, and nothing we loved about the first two books even encompassed within the third book at all.

I enjoyed Hunger Games a lot, and Catching Fire as well (though I thought that Catching Fire had some flaws). These flaws became all the more apparent in Mockingjay, where the fast pace and any character development was quickly derailed. The main problems can be summed up thusly:

1) Limitations of the point of view. In Hunger Games, Katniss's first person POV helped keep up the suspense. You only knew what she knew in the arena, and you read to find out what was going on. When were the Careers going to find her and try to kill her? What were Peeta's motivations? Etc, etc. This also worked in Catching Fire. However, much of Mockingjay is spent with people explaining what happened off-screen to Katniss. She gets told things second hand a lot. This really bothered me. I wanted to see the action take place, not be told about it. What little action there is in the beginning is the awkward, staged propaganda pieces which make little sense. Which brings me to the next point.

2) The action in the back third of the book was poorly written. I think it was rushed. At no point in Hunger Games did I have trouble understanding what was going on. I had to reread parts several times to understand what had happened, particularly Finnick's and Prim's deaths. The last part was basically one big swirl of confusion, choppily written and edited. What's more, the constant need to tie everything back to the Hunger Games got old really fast with the "pods are like being back at the Games!" thing. Uhhh no.

3) Gale's rather odious character derailment. I was indifferent to who Katniss ended up declaring her love for, but all the ploys that Collins used to get Gale out of the picture just felt cheap to me. Him possibly having a part in the bomb that killed her sister? Katniss needed that to realize that he wasn't right for her? That's cheap. She should have had to struggle to reach that conclusion on her own, rather than making Gale not only uncomfortably, if indirectly, responsible for Prim's death on top of having Gale be a jerk to Katniss through most of the book. Collins set up a perfect plot for Katniss to realize she loved Peeta. Taking his love away from her should have really finally opened up her eyes to what she felt, and had her try to earn him, but this is relatively glossed over.

4) Collins seems to have forgotten that the readers see the world through Katniss's eyes. And hollow, inactive, depressed, and drugged up eyes are not really the best eyes to see the world through. A different writer might have been able to make this work, but keeping Katniss's depression and lethargy compelling was just outside the scope of her gifts. She's much better at other things that she didn't capitalize on. Katniss is horribly traumatized -- as she should be -- but wandering, self-centered thoughts about how traumatized she is don't make for very interesting reading in Collins's hands. After a while, I was really starting to hate Katniss, and how she seemed unwilling to sacrifice anything for the rebellion. Everything seemed to come back to her. Oh, Haymitch manipulated me in the arena! How terrible! It's not like he wasn't trying to do something good for the world at large by doing so! These thoughts, all of which we're privy to, got wearing fast.

I think Collins needed more time to write this book. The ending in particular felt extremely rushed. In the end, it wasn't the worst book I've ever read, but it was so far from living up to the promise of the first two installments that I just hated it.

I'm going to say it again - this review has major spoilers. I simply don't think that I can discuss my disappointment with the book, and the series over all now, without actually discussing the events of the book. So, if you haven't read the book yet, and you don't want to know what happens, don't read this review!!! You have been warned.

First, let me start with the positives. This book was very fast paced and hard to put down, like the rest of the series. I read it very swiftly, with few breaks. Some of the supporting characters develop beautifully in this book. Finnick especially really rounded out in this book. Because you care about a lot of the supporting characters, you really care if they die. That's a big thing for me. When reading a book about war, I don't want to feel like I'm trapped in one of those shooting video games, where a death only means more points. In this book, most of the deaths were gut wrenching. You REALLY felt their loss. That might upset some people, but for me it was one of the strong points of the book. There also were deaths where you didn't care, because both you and Katniss were too numb at this point. That also was a strong point for me. It made the war feel that much more real and horrible. The war is not simply about good guys and bad guys. There are numerous shades of grey. District 13 is more than just the good guys sweeping in. I liked that.

Now, on to the negatives.

One of the main reasons I did not like this book was I didn't feel it completed Katniss's character arc, or did justice to her as a character. This sounds like I'm quibbling, but I'm not. It's a major flaw in the book. In fantasy and science fiction, the main character's inner struggle has to mirror the world's outer struggle. The series is about revolting against an evil, freedom suppressing government and instating a new one in its place. Therefore, Katniss has to move from being an extremely resilient and unpredictable pawn to being in full control of her life. Otherwise the full meaning of the revolution is weakened, if it is not reflected in the emotional journey of the character.

But instead Katniss remains an unpredictable pawn, manipulated by outside forces, struggling to retain her identity when she has no true control over her life. That she's manipulated by 13 rather than President Snow only adds salt to the wound. She's far too passive, in the book where she should be the most active. She can only react, not act. She reacts to others decisions, never making her own.

That's fine for the first two books. But in the third book Katniss needs to mature. She needs to develop as a character, and really have control over her talents and her future. She needs to undergo the emotional journey of the revolution, and be the human face of what is happening in the country. But that doesn't happen, hence my problem with the book. Instead, Katniss is plopped into yet another situation where she is manipulated and used for others advantage, and she has to survive. This time it is being District 13's Mockingjay. Katniss is used to spur the other districts into revolution. At first she doesn't want to be the Mockingjay, because she doesn't trust District 13. Then, after seeing the realities of the war, she decides to go ahead with it and be their Mockingjay. All right. But it's past time for Katniss to decide to be used by other people. She needs to shape her fate for herself at this point. We've had two books where she had to survive others decisions. Now she needs to start making her own decisions. But the most she does is set conditions. 'I'll be your Mockingjay, if you don't kill the other victors". She doesn't decide her be HER Mockingjay. She doesn't make the revolution her own, the way Gale does. That is Katniss reacting to District 13's needs, not acting based on her own.

This was at the beginning of the book, so I could have forgiven it if Katniss had gone on and taken more and more control of the Revolution after that. She has the power to. She is an incredibly powerful person. And she doesn't do that. She does what 13 wants her to do, only deviating impulsively. 13 takes to to 8, to film her. Katniss jumps into the fighting when she's not supposed to. She asserts her independence a little, but only within 13's boundaries. She never sets her own boundaries. Katniss even realizes that she has power in that scene. But she does nothing with it. She doesn't say; "I have power. I can move people. I'm going to use my status as a Mockingjay to ensure that the revolution is successful and the new government never repeats the horrors of the old." She simply continues to be what 13 wants her to be; that is a tool for the good of the revolution.

This happens consistently. The climax of the book should have been the height of Katniss's independence. She should have figured out how to use her charisma. She should be making decisions at this point. Instead, the most Katniss does is lead a band of rebels through the capital in order to kill President Snow, WHICH THEN DOES NOT HAPPEN. That really bothered me. People died left and right on this mission, she almost gets there. She sees President Snow's mansion. Then her sister gets bombed, and she gets burned. She's taken by 13 once again and is put in a hospital. Once again she's in someone else's power. At the height of her measly independence, she's once again placed in someone else's power, and she doesn't even complete the mission to make it worth it. The entire mission was basically pointless. Prim's death was pointless. Prim dies, and Katniss loses it. But Katniss loses it to sit by herself in a corner. This is hardly anything new. Katniss is on the edge of losing it for the entire book. Prim's death was not needed to spur that. And Katniss should not have lost it at the climax of the book. If she had to lose it, it should have happened midway through the book. Then she could have pulled herself together and done what she needed to do. I think that what should have happened was that Prim's death spurred Katniss to get into the mansion and kill Snow. She does this, faces Snow, and forces him onto a balcony or something to shoot him publicly. Then Coin can show up, etc...

Speaking of Coin's death, that also bothered me. I was glad Katniss shot her. But Katniss doesn't sit there and think: 'Coin will be a really bad leader. She wanted to do another Hunger Games! She'll be just as bad as Snow once she gets the power. I have to stop her any way that I can!' Instead, Katniss lets herself get manipulated by Snow to kill Coin. Then she's put on trial for her life, and she doesn't even get to defend her decision at her own trial. Instead, she's not even there. Other people decide that she can live. She never argues for her life. Other virtually nameless people do, behind her back.

Which brings me to the ending, which also really bothers me. She's shipped off to 12, where she lives her life quietly with Peeta, starting their own family and remembering the deaths that happened. Once again, Katniss takes no active part in this decision. It reeked to me of the unpredictable element of the revolution being shut away somewhere quiet where she couldn't do damage to the new regime. Then, in 12, she does nothing but sit around with Peeta and have babies. Now, let me make it clear that there's nothing wrong with trying to live a normal life and bringing more life into the world after a bloody revolution. Most people would want to do that. But the decision didn't come from Katniss herself trying to take control of her life, and that's where I have problems with it. First of all, it doesn't resolve any of her issues. It doesn't give her power over herself, it doesn't give her any means to prevent the new government from being as bad as the old, it doesn't allow her to live up to her full potential. This is ESPECIALLY a problem when the entire series was about the effect of dictatorship on the individual. For Katniss, it was about how Katniss was consistently used and manipulated, and never had the chance to live her life based on her own terms. Her freedom was so restricted, she could simply react and hope to survive. In the new government Katniss needs to be able to act for herself, and she never does.

The thing that really bothered me is that it was so easy to fix. All that would be needed is for Katniss to be recommended by the people or the revolutionaries or simply Gale for a part in the new government, as the face of the government or something like that. Katniss goes up and makes a speech about how she's honored but she simply can't accept. She has seen what power can do to people, and she wants no part in it. She just wants the life denied to her by the government in the first place. She's going back to 12, where she can live with her memories and try to rebuild a fraction of what Snow destroyed. THEN she goes off to 12 and lives with Peeta and starts a family. That way, it's HER OWN decision. It's Katniss taking control of her life, and living it the way she wants to. The way it is in the book is Katniss being manipulated by outside forces yet again.

Since in good science fiction and fantasy the character's inner conflict mirrors the world's outer conflict, the fact that Katniss's inner journey was never fully resolved makes this book flawed. It essentially makes the series fail to resolve anything it started out to do. What does a new, equitable government mean to the individuals involved after they lost so much to end a horrific dictatorship? We don't know. Katniss doesn't know, because she is still a pawn. The fact that Katniss virtually remained a rebellious pawn throughout the entire series, never coming into her own, is unacceptable to me. It ruined the book for me, and the series.

I absolutely love the first books and I was totally certain the third would be just as great but I have to say it was overall really disappointing. The worst part for me was the lack of character development, I was expecting anything tragic to happen to any character including Katniss but I never thought she would completely ignore their relationships which were the foundation of the first books. Maybe success ruined it for the author, she started believing she had to write "Literature", send a big message and somehow forgot to be loyal to her story.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

I guess my major complaints are: Katniss's mother is never "real" to me, there is not a single scene in this book that makes her alive, differently from CF and in the end she just disappears, doesn't even visit Katniss in recovery. Finninck's death was so gratuitous, they seemed to have time to escape those mutts and he was an excellent survivor, didn't seem realistic to me. The capitol city is full of pods? Why??? The last rebellion was 75 years ago! One of Katniss's best qualities in the arena was her capacity to evaluate her chances. How could she and a bunch of trained soldiers cross an occupied city and invade a well defended mansion to kill the president ??? It was totally absurd to me and this was the whole last third of the book. Prim's death was a big mistake, not because it happened, I was imagining the HG series being what it was, dark and realistic, somebody big was probably going to die in the war. I didn't think it would be Gale or Peeta because that could be a cheap way to save Katniss from choosing one of them and Collins didn't run from tough choices in first books. I was betting on Haymitch or Prim from the beginning. But I thought it would be a sad, well written scene like Rue's death not the insane bombing I didn't fully understand yet. Coin was maybe evil but not crazy, she wouldn't kill lots of children with such a big chance to be discovered. Worse. What was Prim doing over there? A thirteen year old girl still learning the basics? When the war already won? What exactly happened to Johanna? Gale?

And of course, Peeta. He was the ray of sunshine that made the first books feel hopeful despite all the violence. I could have done without that but I wish it had been for a good reason. I understand the choice of his "mental confusion" when he returned. I always thought he idealized Katniss too much and I as soon as he tried to choke her I thought that would be a great way to develop their relationship and conclude the series. He would slowly come to his senses, become the old Peeta again but finnally see her for what she really was while she would learn to really value his qualities and fight for what they had, what they could have, learning this was what she really needed. This would be "the choice" that was hinted in the first books, a slow realistic proccess, without an actual "choice" scene. But that never happens. Katniss mentions she would have chosen him anyway and that she does love him but it is too little too late, by then it seems he only went crazy so she could infuse the book with more suffering and there was no point in it. Not that it has to have a point, I don't mind reading sad stuff, watching sad movies, but they have to be really good and well made otherwise it is just melodrama. Like most people have already said the ending is totally rushed, that is a poor way to end a trilogy. I would have liked to read about them "growing back together" at least to make up for all the previous mistakes in the book at that point. I really hope in the future I can reread the first books and make up an ending of my own!

SPOILERS AHEAD

You know it is a very bad sign when you are reading a particularly gruesome scene in which a major character dies and your first reaction is not grief or horror but to wonder how Lionsgate is going to include that in the movie without losing the PG-13 rating. And then to wonder if Lionsgate had any clue how dramatically Suzanne Collins was going to derail what had, up until Mockingjay, been a remarkably inventive and engrossing series.

Mockingjay was one of my most anticipated reads of the year. So far, it has been the biggest disappointment. It's not a bad book, but it could have been so, so much more if Suzanne Collins had managed to trust the intelligence of her readers, and allowed us to draw our own conclusions about war and its cost. I think most people would have gotten the point without being bludgeoned by it in such a heavy-handed and unbalanced way. I wrote the following paragraph in response to another review, and it sums up one of my major issues with Mockingjay:

"...Collins' intention was to show how compared to the realities of war, personal relationships don't matter. She sacrificed the major impact of her story to preach a self-evident message: War is Hell. No kidding. The true tragedy of war is its impact on real people, and real relationships, and unfortunately, there weren't any people who felt very real in Mockingjay. All the deaths would have mattered a lot more to me as a reader if the characters had been multi-dimensional. ... I can think of several places in the book where just a few more words or paragraphs would have shed a lot of light on the characters and their motivations, and would have made the losses that much more poignant or horrifying."

Characters who had been so vibrant and interesting in the first two books were one dimensional and inconsistent in Mockingjay. So flat and lifeless had they become that when they, inevitably, bit the dust, I hardly cared. What should have been the emotional climax, Prim's horrific death, didn't elicit anything more from me than a "Well, you could see that coming a mile away." And the impact of Katniss's breakdown following Prim's death was diluted by the amount of time Katniss had already spent hospitalized, drugged, or otherwise wallowing in misery.

I am guessing that Collins wanted to show how helpless Katniss is, and how futile her efforts to take control of her life are. I'm guessing, because I don't really think she showed that in any way that elicited pity or compassion from me. It mostly all seemed like a huge muddled mess. And, even worse, it felt manipulative, and intellectually dishonest. I don't think there are many people who would contend that war is a good thing. There is no doubt that media can be intrusive, used to sway public opinion, and that reality shows can be grotesque. But those very same media that Collins attempts to skewer in the Hunger Games books are the media she is using to drum up publicity for her books. Ironic much?

My very biggest problem with Mockingjay rests with the overall tone of the ending. I didn't want or expect hearts, flowers and rainbows, but if an author is going to include an epilogue that is at least 15 years after the events, I do expect to see some character growth, some movement towards healing, even if that healing can never be complete. I would even have settled for an indication that Katniss actually had some love for her children and for Peeta. If it is true that human history is filled with an unending cycle of wars, it is also true that human beings are remarkably resilient, and resilience had been one of Katniss's most notable characteristics. Instead, in the epilogue we are apparently left with a Katniss whose emotions are so deadened that she is incapable of joy in her children or in her husband. I can't fathom what Collins wanted me, as a reader, to feel at that point. Life is misery and then we die? War destroys everything and there's no hope? I have no idea. What I mostly felt was that I had just wasted 5 hours of my life that could have been spent reading better books.