Mockingjay

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Title: Mockingjay
Author: Suzanne Collins
Year: 2010
Genre: Teen/thriller/sci-fi
Rating: 2

The end of a series is supposed to settle the readers' minds, even if it's not a happy ending. We want to see our heroes reach a resting place to nurse their wounds and work their way toward happiness after the battle is over.
But for a hyperactive, ADD plot like Mockingjay's, concluding is synonymous with death. Had Suzanne Collins not committed to a trilogy, she would have probably drawn out Katniss's story for another two books or so, and if it would have helped to pace this novel better, she would have been right to do so. As it stands, Mockingjay reads like twenty climaxes smashed together to make a jarring, heaving, ponderous plot laced with gratuitous gore and little meaning. The only thing that keeps us going is an attachment to the central characters.
At the beginning, we find Hunger Games victor Katniss Everdeen broken, bruised, and confused after her dramatic rescue from the arena and removal to the mythical District Thirteen, which resembles some kind of industrial distopia. Katniss chafes at the rigorous rules of her new home and at the expectations placed upon her to become the Mockingjay, the symbol of the rebellion now seizing Panem. For the past two years, Katniss's presence on national TV has been sparking these seeds of discontent, and now the rebels see her as an icon of hope, of defiance. All she wants to do is go back to District Twelve with Gale Hawthorne and her family, but her home has burned to the ground, her friends either dead or refugees, and Peeta Mellark in captivity in the Capitol.
Katniss, besides being faced with the decision to be the face of the revolution or not, is also faced with that omnipresent question of romance: her best friend Gale, or her fellow victor Peeta. As the violence spins more and more out of her control and she begins to question her own dedication to the cause, the world exerts more pressure on her and on her fellow soldiers, driving their war to the bitter end.
The most interesting thing that Collins does with the idea of revolution is the PR face. Katniss is by no means the great general that the rebels need to command them; she is merely the symbol that they all recognize to keep fighting, and the hard-hearted president of District Thirteen is set on using her as propaganda to propagate her war. The executives of the movement tape clip after clip of Katniss and her team to indoctrinate the people, constantly considering her behavior and how it will affect mass opinion of the war. Katniss knows this and feels ill-used, which is the most complicated emotion in all the books that Collins puts forth: are the deaths of all the people she encourages Katniss's fault?
When it comes to sheer surface entertainment, the Hunger Games series is unrivaled. Loaded with suspense and danger, Mockingjay keeps readers on the edges of their seats and guessing until the end, the plot careening down a wildly twisting path until the conclusion. And it is twisting: any sense of restraint that Collins felt about her violence is suddenly stripped away in her third installment. The first two books were graphic, but there was always a subtle hint of reluctance to kill characters that we had grown attached to. Not so here. Just like her characters, Collins seems to have driven herself to the edge and held her ground strongly enough to kill off rebels that she had written extensively about. This lends the story a feeling of reality-- revolutions are horrifyingly bloody, and many beloved people die every time. It would have been laughable had all of Katniss's allies made it through unharmed.
Oh, do the parallels of the evils of socialism continue. District Thirteen is an eerie shell of Soviet Russia, with toe-trampling rules and over-the-top punishments for tiny crimes. Freedoms are restricted to the bare minimum, and the people don't seem to mind. Only Katniss and Gale, the brave champions of freedoms, are willing to defy the rules of the overbearing society, braving the anger of the ruling powers for the general good.
However, that's the only real parallel. The surface entertainment is about all the value available in Mockingjay; Collins awkwardly skirts around any pithy topics, even if she has set up a perfect situation for them to be explored. One theme that appears over and over again is the question of what it truly means to kill another person. She repeatedly mentions this struggle in Katniss's thoughts throughout all three books, and yet after roughly 1100 pages, we still don't know what it really means. Death after death goes by, and the only one that really comes close to touching that question is Rue's death in the arena in the first book.
(On a side note, does Collins really think she's being clever with her Latin? Maybe for a monolingual society she is, but seriously, I saw the Rome parallel before I even read the book. She didn't need her whole Panem et Circenses bit. Plus, Avox is a really pathetic attempt. When the characters think 'hijack' is an archaic word, how on Earth do they know enough Latin to name various things?)
The most disappointing part of Mockingjay is the ending. With all this colorful, thrilling writing under her belt, one would think that Collins could piece together a conclusion worthy of the characters that she has spent so much time developing, but we're left with a twenty-five page slop that is like staring at grey wallpaper with grey patterns on it. Sure, she's trying to portray a fog of grief, but the writing should induce tears of sympathy, not boredom. Even the epilogue is arbitrary and pointless. The bare facts of how the story ends are sort of bittersweet and touching, but change in pace drops us like a stone into the cold water of the book being over. Something tells me that her publisher was pushing her toward a deadline and she had to crank out an ending.
Altogether, the Hunger Games tells a beautiful, terrible story, filled with characters we can believe in images we won't forget. Perhaps the meaning is meant to come from us as we read. Collins has provided us with a beautiful wilderness of story; it's up to us to make it mean something.
 Mockingjay is available on the Kindle for $5.99, or in hardback from Amazon for $9.86. Because the Hunger Games is such a book of our times, it's worth a read, but don't go in expecting deep thoughts. Consider the series a light weekend thing, but definitely don't read it to your kids. It's a little graphic even for adults.

Catching Fire

Original image at suzannecollinsbooks.com/

Title: Catching Fire
Author: Suzanne Collins
Year: 2009
Genre: Teen/thriller/popular
Rating: 2

The second installment of a trilogy is almost always the best of the three. Take for example The Two Towers, which captures the soul of the whole story, or The Empire Strikes Back of Star Wars. Because the central story doesn't have to introduce strangers into a brand new world or say goodbye, it nearly writes itself. The tension strings the two together, and the book can act like the climax of the whole.
Catching Fire, the second novel of the acclaimed Hunger Games series, acts like the first. After the choppy, rushed introduction of the first book, the second flows much more naturally and freely.
Suzanne Collins brings us back into her futuristic country of Panem, where Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark have returned to their home district and prepare for their forced tour of the districts. Their relationship is forced and awkward now that the games are over and they must go back to their original, simpler lives. However, the world has changed since Katniss's explosive presence on the Hunger Games. The twelve districts are on the brink of revolution, and the remarkably revolting President Snow approaches Katniss to enlist her to defuse the rebellions steadily growing in the country.
But Katniss has other problems. And as her personal life spins out of control, so does the feeling in the country.
Collins has clearly realized that in the face of the immense popularity of The Hunger Games, she needs to refine her writing for a larger audience. The syntax of this novel is much cleaner and more mature, and the characters think in much more logical, mature manner. Peeta, who was borderline childish for large sections of the first novel, is suddenly an adult and full of much more relatable pain. Gale, who was pointless and flat, suddenly folds out like origami into something far more complicated and able to stand on his own. He remains a little cliche in places, but his interactions with the citizens of District 12 glow far more than those with Katniss.
Better yet is the unpredictability of the novel. While The Hunger Games is both somewhat predictable and even a touch corny at times, Catching Fire pitches a continuation of the story in a familiar direction with the touches of Suzanne's overall goal for the story. Katniss, Haymitch, and Peeta are pitched into a sort of dysfunctional family relationships because of their one horrid commonality-- they were forced to kill their peers for the entertainment of those around them.
And yet, despite the improvement of the entire novel, there is a hollowness, as if Collins has written the body of the story but sucked the marrow out of the bones. It has a skeleton, but the bones are empty and there's no blood in its body. She tried to make up for it with the gratuitous amount of violence, but this does not stop us from feeling a certain emptiness for a true meaning in the story. One of the themes that screams to be explored is also the most obvious: what does it mean to kill another person? What has to change inside of us to be able to face someone just like us and kill them to save our own life?
Sadly, Collins skirts these great questions for the entertainment value. Not that it is lacking-- the story is fast-paced, gripping, and tear-jerking in places. Great new characters are introduced, and the relationship between Katniss and Peeta changes into a form both more complicated and more simple. Katniss does all she can just to survive, even when that means hurting the people she thinks she might love.
The title is a double entendre and refers to the first Games, which takes about half the book to figure out. However, the scene in which she fulfills it is strikingly unforgettable; even if she is no Dickens, she has the visuals of a master.
Altogether, though, Suzanne Collins has done that thing that authors dream of: writing a sequel that improves on the original. Available for $5.99 on the Kindle or $9.87 for the hardback on Amazon, Catching Fire is worth the read for anyone, but read the original first, because otherwise confusion is inevitable.
The film is due out in September 2013, with a much larger cast (including Philip Seymour Hoffman as Plutarch Heavensbee). Look for the long line of screaming teenage girls outside the movie theatres.

The Hunger Games

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Title: The Hunger Games
Author: Suzanne Collins
Year: 2008
Genre: Sci-fi/thriller/teen
Rating: 2

Action! Danger! Tragedy! Oppression! Romance!
You couldn't ask for more on a movie poster. Perhaps, in fact, if any book could have skipped the written phase and gone straight to film, it would be The Hunger Games. Rapid-paced action and visceral imagery make this book a top-notch story, and even if the language leaves something to be desired, it hits its target crowd exceptionally well. After all, sometimes all we need is a good story, right?
Suzanne Collins is an experienced children's writer; she has written multiple episodes for 1990s TV shows like Little Bear, Oswald, and Clarissa Explains It All. She has also written a five-book series for children known as The Underland Chronicles, which are an interpretation of the classic Alice in Wonderland.
However, with The Hunger Games, she takes a step into the gritter world of teen fiction, leaving behind squeaky-clean genres for a heftier tale. The novel tells the story of 16 year-old Katniss Everdeen, a poor girl living in the 12th District of a post-apocalyptic North American country called Panem. She is content to lead a quiet, meager existence by illegally poaching off of government land to feed her family until her younger sister, Primrose, is called out to be a participant in the bloody gladitorial contest known as the Hunger Games. In desperation to save her sister's life, Katniss volunteers to take her place, sealing her fate to kill or be killed.
To make matters more complicated, a boy that Katniss owes her life to, Peeta Mellark, is named as the other participant, obliging her to kill someone that she feels indebted to. Thus, she explains, is the horror of the Games: in order to survive, you must give up all your dignity, which is the government's aim. As the book progresses, the relationship between Katniss and Peeta becomes much muddier and more complicated, and even she is not sure how she feels about the boy who saved her life, the boy she is obliged to kill.
Told in the first person, the book places the readers firmly inside Katniss's mind. We hear her thoughts, her gut reactions to things, and see the grossly unfair world of Panem as she sees it. Grammar fanatics will squirm and squawk as they read turns of phrase (think high school language, written down) and the truncated fragments of thoughts are jarring, but the argument stands that they do place you into the mind of a coarse teenager.
Collins has created a marvelously dark, creative world replete with extensive details and logical, ordinary, yet beautiful characters. Although some of the people we meet are rather two-dimensional (Prim and Effie are exceptionally flat, and Cato runs a close third) Katniss and Peeta are fully fleshed out, and blend together beautifully. As time progresses, we understand more of the darkness and complete victory that the Games are to the Capitol, dehumanizing their victims and their audience in one blow.
The story is a thinly veiled allegory for the evils of socialism, what with the rigid rule controls on each district's product and the omnipotence and omniscience of the government. Katniss and Peeta represent the young capitalists defying the shackles of governmental regulation, shaking off the social expectations of submission and fear. Collins has essentially created a effective propaganda piece for republicanism with a action-packed, fast-paced, driven plot filled with believable people and graphic imagery.
The target audience is most definitely teenagers and young adults. The language is easy and flows much like an average American talks, and there are few moments without some sort of action or plot-centric exchange. Collins draws in a female audience with the sweet, innocent romance between Peeta and Katniss and the male audience with the sheer horror of the Games that she describes. (Cato's death is particularly horrifying, and will shock anyone with a visual imagination.) Intuitively weaving all of her different articles together to create one enormous, lumpy tapestry, Collins introduces us to a plot that we can love and remember, cheer and grieve for, and step easily into with the tightly-woven words she has written.
Because it is told in first person, the book stays with Katniss nearly every waking moment for a few weeks, but at just over 300 pages is surprisingly short. While that style necessitates some dull moments, some of the scenes are exceptionally poignant, such as the reaping (where the participants, known as "tributes," are named) when Katniss throws herself forward to save her sister. Rife with passionate language and the impulsive nature of the action, we are gripped throughout the telling and tied tightly to the brave girl as she sacrifices herself for love of family. Because it is told in the present tense, the readers experience the events in hypothetical "real time," which places us even more inside the mind of Katniss, lending us her emotions and distractions. Perhaps it is because we nearly become her, but our heroine is one of the most complete characters in popular literature.
The film, starring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss and Josh Hutcherson as Peeta, came out in March 2012 and drew an enormous audience for its extended run. Catching Fire, the next film, is expected in September 2013.
The Hunger Games is available for a meager $5.00 on the Kindle (it's free if you join Amazon Prime), or $10.89 in hardback. The entire trilogy, which includes Catching Fire and Mockingjay, is available for $18.99 on the Kindle or $29.50 in hardback. Because of the popularity and timeliness of these books, they are probably taken out of most libraries most of the time; if you can't borrow them, they're worth the purchase. Mine were given to me by some wonderful people as a Christmas gift, and I profusely thank them. It's taken me a really long time to jump on the bandwagon.
Merry Christmas, everyone! Hope you got or gave at least one book today. Enjoy your break and keep reading!