1,571 of 1,723 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unexpected Direction, but Perfection, August 24, 2010
This review is from: Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, Book 3) (Hardcover)
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.
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308 of 354 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The detractors of this book wanted a fairytale, September 13, 2010
This review is from: Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, Book 3) (Hardcover)
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.
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175 of 212 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The good news is that Suzanne Collins is making a lot of money..., August 26, 2010
This review is from: Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, Book 3) (Hardcover)
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.
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