Mockingjay The Hunger Games

PDF Book Review

Suzanne Collins - Book 3 of The Hunger Games Series

Mockingjay : The Hunger Games PDF Book Review

Suzanne Collins - Book 3 of The Hunger Games Series

1,465 of 1,609 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unexpected Direction, but Perfection, August 24, 2010

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By A. R. Bovey

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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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