Mockingjay (part III of The Hunger Games Trilogy)
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…
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Review by Sir Furboy for Mockingjay (part III of The Hunger Games Trilogy)
(4 / 5)
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Mockingjay really is an epic conclusion to one of the best trilogies I can remember reading. These books are wonderful, and thoroughly recommended. I cannot praise them highly enough. The first book in the series is one of the best books I have read.
And yet, I give this book four stars, and not five. Taken on its own, I found some problems with this one book. But taken as the conclusion to this series, there is nothing that would make me not recommend them. In particular, the first book was incredibly moving and the story through all three was novel, intelligent and fast paced.
My problem with Mockingjay is that Suzanne Collins has attempted to repeat the “Hunger Games” formula in this book in a setting that does not quite fit it. The “seventy sixth hunger games” is envisaged in the middle of a revolution, but much of the real action of the revolution takes place away from Katniss. As the book is narrated in the first person, we necessarily skip over huge amounts of detail about battles, rescue missions and the waging of the war.
This was a stylistic choice of the author, of course. This book was clearly not meant to be just another account of a rebellion against an oppresive regime. Instead, this was Katniss’ story, and fleshing out all those details would just have made the book very very long.
When we do see the “Hunger Games” portion of the book, I felt a little like this was imported so as to keep the theme running. The reason for that section is clear from the author’s point of view – making to story fit the series. It is less clear that it really makes sense in the logic of the story.
However, the real problem is that ultimately the war felt like it was easily won. We were told a certain mission would be costly (I won’t give details to avoid spoilers), but what we were not given was any real feel for the costs involved.
And then at the conclusion of the book, something momentous happens, but it appears that no one ever asks Katniss why she acted in the way she chose to act. That did not seem to make sense to me, and again it felt like the big action was taking place off stage and I was left with the piece player.
Despite that criticism, I still enjoyed this book very much. It wrapped up the series well. These books are powerful and a little disturbing. They are books to make us think and ponder, and cannot be read without some emotional involvement, and this one was no exception.
The story finishes, but you feel like you wish it could have been different – even as you know it really could not have been.
Highly recommended series. If you found this review first, you will not regret finding the first book “The Hunger Games”, and reading that.
Review by Paul Donovan for Mockingjay (part III of The Hunger Games Trilogy)
(5 / 5)
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The Hunger Games trilogy has been a great story arc, set in a future that is at once grotesque and yet still recognisable. The final volume, Mockingjay, has a shift from its two predecessors. The earlier books had something of a balance between the violence of the world of Panem, and the romance / fake romance / potential romance of the three protagonists. The romance story was intertwined with violence and survival stories, of course. In Mockingjay, the romance is less in evidence. Partly this is because there is a separation between the main characters, physically and otherwise, for much of the book. Partly, however, it is because Ms Collins has placed more emphasis on the horrors of war, and the complexities of moral decisions that are taken in the political arena.
Ms Collin’s triumph is to create a description of a future world that is complete, and inhabited with characters that one can become emotionally engaged with. Her points are made through how those characters develop, and what happens to them. Because the characters are so well written, the fate that befalls them has an impact on the reader. The deaths here do not have the somewhat abstract quality of the previous two books – in those volumes there was anonymity, and very often the reader felt slightly disengaged, as if a Capitol based television viewer of what unfolded (the deaths of Roo and Cato being the exceptions, perhaps). In Mockingjay, the deaths are written in a way that more directly impacts the reader and underscores the brutal reality of war. The abrupt, casual way in which some characters are killed (or their death is revealed to Katniss) at times heightens this.
This much creates a book that is an entertaining if somewhat shocking read. However, Ms Collins has gone further with the story arc, and with this volume in particular. Ms Collins clearly wants her readership (of whatever age) to think.
Panem is a grotesque vision of the future, but it can also be viewed as just a distorting mirror of our own times. A world where much of the population work in environmentally unsafe conditions, often under authoritarian regimes, to supply goods for those who were lucky enough to be born in the right country? Battling for environmental resources (food riots, oil wars, and tensions over water supplies in today’s world)? Children committing violence and killing without discrimination (Africa’s child soldiers)? The power of mental torture (all too often in the news today)? Roadside bombs, killers that are human and yet have lost humanity, voyeurism as entertainment, the sex trade – the list of parallels goes on. It is no wonder that the romantic thread is subordinated to the realities of modern life – and yet, without being “Hollywood” in her ending (no one could suggest that of this story), Ms Collins still has romance play a pivotal role.
This is a well written, compelling, clever, and (in a non pejorative sense) an awful book.
Review by D. Markham for Mockingjay (part III of The Hunger Games Trilogy)
(2 / 5)
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First thing I can say about this book is that I found the pacing uneven. What I mean is that the previous 2 books had a pretty steady storytelling pace, and while the action was fast and furious you could still picture it all and understand everything, and even when there was no action the story moved along at a nice pace that kept you hooked. I found in Mockingjay that it was incredibly slow getting going, and I found myself skim reading massive paragraphs of text that didn’t interest me in the slightest and were, quite frankly, un needed, then towards in the last 100 pages or so there is so much going on that your brain is like o.O what is going on!? It just seemed like one jumbled mess! Why have nothing happen then everything happen at once? I didn’t like the feel of this book…it wasn’t Katniss’ story anymore, it was just all about the events happening around her with her chucked in the middle of it, and since it’s all from her point of view we don’t really get the big picture. Everything seemed ‘too easy’ as well… in terms of the rebellion against the capitol, they build it up and then there is no climax!
I disliked Katniss in this book, which is odd because I liked her in the previous 2. She seems like she’s not making her own decisions and is little more than a puppet, she’s cold towards both Peeta and Gale even though they really didn’t do much to deserve it, and she’s generally drugged up/hospitalised for the majority of the book -.-. To be honest…she seems pretty pitiable and pathetic, I want the Katniss I know back! Peeta was absent for half the book, and then when he was present, he wasn’t himself (well none of the characters are to be honest) and I really don’t think he participated an awful lot in the story. Gale was completely butchered in this book and made to seem like a cruel person and Katniss and him grow pretty distant during the book. Also I found it stupid how Katniss goes: “I can’t do this without Gale by my side.” or something like that, then she spends the whole time hating on him! She’s also a giant hypocrite…”Gale you can’t just kill everyone!” later on she kills tons of people..I mean what?! xD It made me angry how OOC everyone was >.< Personally, I thought that too many new characters were introduced all at once with really no intro to them at all. When someone spoke I was like…wait, who are you? and when some people died I was like…-.- seriously is that it?! It was so fast paced your brain didn’t have time to register their deaths. Literally a sentence is dedicated to each death/into of a character xD The worst thing was, I really didn’t care what was happening anymore. I know that everyone is like: “this book made me cry/this book is sooo depressing’ or whatever, but I just didn’t care if it was anymore xD The ending was possible one of the worst endings I have ever read and wasn’t closure I was hoping for. The thing that irked me the most was how some characters were just completely removed from existence and forgotten by Katniss in one sentence. They deserved more of a send off then a lame sentence that made them seem like some total stranger to Katniss. So yeah, I really was disappointed with this book. Give it a go by all means cause I know loads of people enjoyed this book, but on the whole I found it pretty boring and a great jumbled mess which I am very sad about
Review by Quicksilver for Mockingjay (part III of The Hunger Games Trilogy)
(2 / 5)
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I had decided not to leave a review for ‘Mockingjay’ – I figured that such was the quality of the first two books, if you had read them, there was no way you were going to miss out on number three, no matter what sort of reviews it had. Since this page seems to have become a bit of a discussion board for the book, I thought I’d add my two-pen’orth.
After reading the first The Hunger Games novel, I felt that perhaps Collins’ publisher had pushed her into turning what should have been one book into three. I didn’t feel there was anywhere else for the series to go. Despite having essentially the same structure as book 1, book 2 allayed my fears. A strong underlying story seemed to be developing, and it ended with an intriguing cliffhanger. Volume 3 however, has confirmed my suspicions. After such a vital beginning, surely Collins could not have originally envisaged such a garbled and unsatisfactory conclusion?
The problem stems from ‘Mockingjay’ being set in a much wider arena. Collins conveyed the claustrophobia of the arena brilliantly, keeping the tension high at all times. Peculiarly, with Katniss in the outside world, the tension now feels artificial. There are long periods of inactivity, lots of navel-gazing and teenage angst (some might say whining) from Katniss. Then suddenly she is called to another zone, where something dramatic happens. Perhaps because she is not fighting for her life, these sequences lack the drama of the previous two novels. We’ve always known that Katniss will somehow survive, but this time, we know she has to make it to the end of the novel for the big showdown. I couldn’t help wishing Collins would get on with it.
With the first two novels centring around the games, the reader wasn’t asked to suspend their belief too much. Collins gave us a set of rules, and wrote a terrific story within them. The opening out the setting into the wider world, means it needs to stand up to closer scrutiny. The political and geographical system just don’t survive any sort of examination. There is no way an all powerful government would set things up that way. Once you start thinking about Panem too much, the whole premise becomes absurd.
It’s the same case with the city’s defences – it made for great reading, Katniss stalking her prey through the streets of The Capitol, but an it was entirely unrealistic way for a city to defend itself. As for novel’s conclusion, well I don’t want to give too much away, but although powerful, it is extremely disjointed. It feels like Collins bottled writing the ending the novel needed.
The separation of Peeta and Katniss in Mockingjay is a curious decision. The relationship between the two main characters elevated the original novels from good to great. With Gale thrown into the mixture we had a powerful and ambiguous love triangle. We all had our opinions on who Kantiss should be with, and Collins manipulated them expertly. Mockingjay sadly lacks this interaction, pretty much all the way through. Without Peeta, Katniss is diminished; an accurate assessment by the author, but one that spoils her book a little.
All that said, there is still some great writing in here. There are some excellent and tense set pieces, particularly towards the novel’s climax. The author poses questions about how readily the oppressed become the persecutors, in a subtle mirroring of contemporary world politics. Similarly, there is some great analysis of our media soaked lives, and the power of television. Panem is a thinly veiled metaphor for our own world, and anything that prompt questions about its absurdities, can only be a good thing
So sadly, I was not impressed by ‘Mockingjay’ and feel it to be a sorry conclusion to what should have been an excellent series. In any case, I urge you not to listen to me. Instead, buy the book, read it yourself and make up your own mind!
Review by Amandajp for Mockingjay (part III of The Hunger Games Trilogy)
(5 / 5)
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This is probably not the best of the trilogy but it rounds things off nicely. A fantastic series of books and truely original – why isn’t adult fiction this good?