Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, Book 3) [Hardcover]

Suzanne Collins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 24, 2010 | Series: The Hunger Games (Book 3)

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Product Description
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.

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A Q&A with Suzanne Collins, Author of Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games)

Q: You have said from the start that The Hunger Games story was intended as a trilogy. Did it actually end the way you planned it from the beginning?

A: Very much so. While I didn't know every detail, of course, the arc of the story from gladiator game, to revolution, to war, to the eventual outcome remained constant throughout the writing process.

Q: We understand you worked on the initial screenplay for a film to be based on The Hunger Games. What is the biggest difference between writing a novel and writing a screenplay?

A: There were several significant differences. Time, for starters. When you're adapting a novel into a two-hour movie you can't take everything with you. The story has to be condensed to fit the new form. Then there's the question of how best to take a book told in the first person and present tense and transform it into a satisfying dramatic experience. In the novel, you never leave Katniss for a second and are privy to all of her thoughts so you need a way to dramatize her inner world and to make it possible for other characters to exist outside of her company. Finally, there's the challenge of how to present the violence while still maintaining a PG-13 rating so that your core audience can view it. A lot of things are acceptable on a page that wouldn't be on a screen. But how certain moments are depicted will ultimately be in the director's hands.

Q: Are you able to consider future projects while working on The Hunger Games, or are you immersed in the world you are currently creating so fully that it is too difficult to think about new ideas?

A: I have a few seeds of ideas floating around in my head but--given that much of my focus is still on The Hunger Games--it will probably be awhile before one fully emerges and I can begin to develop it.

Q: The Hunger Games is an annual televised event in which one boy and one girl from each of the twelve districts is forced to participate in a fight-to-the-death on live TV. What do you think the appeal of reality television is--to both kids and adults?

A: Well, they're often set up as games and, like sporting events, there's an interest in seeing who wins. The contestants are usually unknown, which makes them relatable. Sometimes they have very talented people performing. Then there's the voyeuristic thrill—watching people being humiliated, or brought to tears, or suffering physically--which I find very disturbing. There's also the potential for desensitizing the audience, so that when they see real tragedy playing out on, say, the news, it doesn't have the impact it should.

Q: If you were forced to compete in the Hunger Games, what do you think your special skill would be?

A: Hiding. I'd be scaling those trees like Katniss and Rue. Since I was trained in sword-fighting, I guess my best hope would be to get hold of a rapier if there was one available. But the truth is I'd probably get about a four in Training.

Q: What do you hope readers will come away with when they read The Hunger Games trilogy?

A: Questions about how elements of the books might be relevant in their own lives. And, if they're disturbing, what they might do about them.

Q: What were some of your favorite novels when you were a teen?

A: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Boris by Jaapter Haar
Germinal by Emile Zola
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

(Photo © Cap Pryor)

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From School Library Journal

Grade 7 Up Following her subversive second victory in the Games, this one composed of winners from past years, Katniss has been adopted by rebel factions as their symbol for freedom and becomes the rallying point for the districts in a desperate bid to take down the Capitol and remove President Snow from power. But being the Mockingjay comes with a price as Katniss must come to terms with how much of her own humanity and sanity she can willingly sacrifice for the cause, her friends, and her family. Collins is absolutely ruthless in her depictions of war in all its cruelty, violence, and loss, leaving readers, in turn, repulsed, shocked, grieving and, finally, hopeful for the characters they've grown to empathize with and love. Mockingjay is a fitting end of the series that began with The Hunger Games (2008) and Catching Fire (2009) and will have the same lasting resonance as William Golding's Lord of the Flies and Stephen King's The Stand. However, the book is not a stand-alone; readers do need to be familiar with the first two titles in order to appreciate the events and characters in this one. Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage Public Library, AK (c) Copyright 2010.  Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 13 and up
  
• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Scholastic Press; 1st edition (August 24, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0439023513
• ISBN-13: 978-0439023511
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2,412 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #5 in Books > Teens > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

More About the Author

Suzanne Collins has had a successful and prolific career writing for children's television. She has worked on the staffs of several Nickelodeon shows, including the Emmy-nominated hit Clarissa Explains It All and The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo. Collins made her mark in children's literature with the New York Times bestselling five-book series for middle-grade readers The Underland Chronicles, which has received numerous accolades in both the United States and abroad. In the award-winning The Hunger Games trilogy, Collins continues to explore the effects of war and violence on those coming of age. Collins lives with her family in Connecticut.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1,694 of 1,861 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unexpected Direction, but Perfection (Potential spoilers, but pretty vague), August 24, 2010

By 

A. R. Bovey - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

364 of 417 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The detractors of this book wanted a fairytale, September 13, 2010

By 

DAVID OTOOLE (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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.

1,121 of 1,377 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Just think of Peeta's "hijacking" as a metaphor for what nihilistic anti-war propaganda does to 'Mockingjay'..., August 31, 2010

By 

Suzanne G. "Suzanne G." (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, Book 3) (Hardcover)

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.