Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games) (edition 2010)

I read the three-part Hunger Games series Monday, Friday, and yesterday. I enjoyed Hunger Games and Catching Fire as children���s books with tension and adventure and good characters and acceptable flaws. I liked how Suzanne Collins combined the Cretan bull-dancing cult/minotaur sacrifice thing with reality television, ���The Lottery,��� and Jonathan Swift (plus Ray Bradbury: no author can be ignorant of the significance of the number 451, especially in a dystopia.) The idea of the hunger games was clever and I bought what happened in the arenas. The third book tackled issues beyond either Collins���s ability or the YA level and it lost me.

Throughout, the frequent disagreement of subject with verb, like the piles of glass that is everywhere (Mockingjay 259), grated. As did ���decimate��� for ���destroy almost all of.��� As did something being ���flesh-colored��� instead of ���my-flesh-colored.��� And why call a city the Capitol? Why not Capital?

Some faults lay deeper than a copy-editor could have corrected, with spoilers:

The overthrow of one (bad) form of government without something else to replace it to me just promises another worse government or anarchy in the near future. Collins was right to bring up the sustainability of population, but not without mention of the fate of the rest of humanity. Did only North Americans survive whatever preceded the Dark Days? From an environmental standpoint, that seems unlikely, but District 13 looked only to the other districts for breeding stock, not to the rest of the world. Where, then, did the coffee come from? (I want to say ���Belgium��� in homage to Emma Thompson���s screenplay of Sense and Sensibility.) How does a fragmented, marginal population sustain itself and its technology?* How will the districts share their resources? Thirteen survived only by draconian communism; with an agricultural district (only one, really?), a beef one, a fish one, a coal one, etc., how will the 13 Original Colonies make do? What will Two do instead of make weaponry? How could Katniss return to 12 and not be involved in ensuring that no one will be hungry again, no, nor any of her folk? How could the technology of television and idea of mandatory viewing exist but not, apparently, a printing press? At least one mutt, the jabberjay, is fertile, so what will happen with the others, as unnatural, murderous, and intelligent as they are?

I knew after Prim died that Katniss couldn���t end up with the person who devised a weapon that used compassion as a component, but I didn���t expect Gale to make it so easy for her by getting a swank job in Two (that easily could entail more weapon-making) and not living in 12, the land he loved. I am glad that the love triangle was not the major tension in the third book; overthrowing a kleptocracy is more important. How could Katniss possibly vote yes on a final Hunger Games?

One bit that is not Collins���s fault but my own reading is that I read the Capitol as Salt Lake City (you do not pass through mountain tunnels between Appalachia and Denver), so I read the Capitol as a Mormon takeover and dreaded the sort of LDS agenda that the Twilight books so clearly possess. (Therefore I was glad that characters relished coffee, even though its source being unexplained annoyed me.)

* I am rereading Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Diamond���s idea that isolated groups develop technologies more slowly than dense populations do, and even lose what technology they arrived in their isolation with, makes perfect sense.

Page after page of gratuitous violence with no room for reflection. Poorly written and an unimaginative ending. Like most trilogies, the first book was the best and each subsequent installment got worse. ( )

I’m completely disappointed with this one. After reading the other two I was so excited for it but I was expecting a better ending. It actually became boring at same point. The writing was confusing, I became lost at some conversations, and this final is just absurd. She spends most of the end out of herself, just drugged, and then in a few pages everything develops. We don’t have a significant explanation for some events, it´s just unreal… I was expecting a better job since the other ones were just exceptional. ( )

Excellent end to a great trilogy. I'm not sure what to say without spoiling the book and the trilogy. I will say that I was fascinated by how events and plans never turn out as expected. ( )

I felt rather under-whelmed by this book, I'm afraid.

One of the things I liked about the previous two was the immediacy and the emotion of the main character and the connection the reader has with her. The fact that she didn't know what was going to happen, didn't agree, but made the best choices within her power.

In this book, a lot of the action is off-screen, out of the character's influence and what action she gets involved in feels staged. Yes, a lot of it is staged by necessity, but by choosing this format, I feel the author loses the immediacy that comes with a story told in first person. This volume is much more epic in nature, more distant from the characters. I feel there is simply too much 'stuff' in this book, a few too many betrayals for them to make a true impact in me. I feel it would have been better had the story been kept simple and more involved on a personal scale.

The fact that I wasn't so involved with the character made me more focused on the fact that I wasn't (have never as a matter of fact) buying the setting. The government, the president, the Capitol are simply too evil and too one-dimensional for me to find them believable as antagonists. ( )