Book Chop: Mockingjay (Spoilers. DUH.)

Title: Mockingjay (Hunger Games 3)
Author: Suzanne Collins
Genre: YA dystopian
Verdict: 90% awesome, 10% WTF

Well, this is it. If there was only one book I wanted to read all year, this was it. I could've foregone anything else for a chance to find out how the Hunger Games trilogy ended.

I won't bother with the premise, the pitch, all that stuff--if you've read this far, you know the series. My initial Chop of The Hunger Games wasn't all that great, more of a geek-out really. For a more in-depth analysis, you'll have to see how it stacks up against similar stories in this Chop here.

I've decided to list Pros and Cons about Mockingjay. There are spoilers. So don't read on if you don't want to know who dies and who doesn't.

BASIC OVERVIEW OF THE PLOT.

District 13 exists underground. Their leader is President Coin. She wants to control the Capitol, and Panem. President Snow (of the Capitol) wants to control District 13. They keep each other at bay with the threat of nuclear missiles. If either of them fires, there will be too few humans left in North America to maintain a "sustainable population." So they don't annihilate each other outright.

Coin mounts a propaganda effort to turn Panem's citizens against the Capitol. This involves filming Katniss, the Mockingjay, in successful military maneuvers. Beetee, the techie tribute, hacks into the Capitol's TV broadcasts and puts the "propos" videos on the air over Snow's own broadcasts. Snow retaliates by airing interviews of a captured and tortured Peeta calling for a ceasefire.

The Capitol attacks a hospital in District 8, killing the helpless injured people inside. Katniss and Gale shoot down some of the fighter jets that bomb the place, and promise escalation in response. Gale and some others then launch a rescue mission into the heart of the Capitol to rescue Peeta.

Peeta has been "hijacked"--a term used to describe brainwashing. Upon seeing Katniss he tries to kill her, and from then on has difficulty distinguishing reality from the memories Snow inserted into his mind. Others rescued include Joanna Mason and Enobaria, Tributes from the Quarter Quell.

Katniss trains for District 13's army. They're going to launch a full-scale assault on the Capitol. Using intelligence gleaned from spies, they get a layout of the random armaments the Capitol has placed in the city, called "pods." Katniss and Finnick Odair instantly recognize the layout as being similar to the Hunger Games arena, giving them the advantage.

Katniss, Peeta, Finnick, Gale and some new characters form a squadron of snipers meant to attack the Capitol. Slowly their numbers dwindle as they get closer to the President's mansion. When they finally reach it, Snow has the place surrounded by children, using them as human shields. Bombs go off in the plaza, injuring and killing several of the children. When 13's medics rush in to help, Katniss's sister Prim is among them, and she's killed when the rest of the bombs detonate.

Katniss goes on a major drug bender. When she awakes, the remaining tributes (six of them: Katniss, Peeta, Haymitch, Enobaria, Beetee and Annie, wife of the late Finnick) are brought to a room by President Coin. She puts it to a vote whether or not to hold one final Hunger Games using the children of President Snow's elite inner circle.

Katniss is supposed to publicly execute President Snow. Instead, she kills Coin, because Snow is dying anyway from poison.

Katniss goes back to District 12. She doesn't see her mother or Gale, and ends up with Peeta. END.


Okay, the Pros:

The opening scene with Katniss going through the ashes of District 12 was really great. Informative, but vintage Collins in the sense that it was clear, quick and gripping. She's an excellent entertainer and this was on par with the previous two books.

District 13 was a haven, but it wasn't like some magic card being played where it made everything all easier. In a lot of ways it just gave Katniss a new challenge, and a political one at that. She goes head-to-head with Coin on many occasions.

Book 1 gave us screen time with Peeta. Book 2 gave us a little more with Gale, but we got a lot more in book 3. He's been a well-developed character from the beginning and it was cool to see him in action instead of just hear about it.

Finnick got fleshed out a lot more, and provided an excellent plot device for the end of the book. We find out why he's such a manwhore if he's in love with a girl (Annie), and why he always tries to get secrets out of people. Very good dimension with him.

Prim is fleshed out more too, not a whole ton, but you see her develop and become a little more mature. I would've preferred more time with her but we got what we needed.

Haymitch gets sober. He's quite productive.

The action scenes were fantastic.

One of my biggest predictions was that the Hunger Games would still play a role in the story. They had to. It's a Hunger Games novel, the games have to be centric. But since the arena was destroyed in book 2, it would be too much of a contrived stretch for them to somehow end up back in the game. (My initial guess was that Katniss would challenge or force Snow into another Games, but it didn't happen that way.) The Games play a role by proxy, and it totally works. And yes, Snow is a player, at least in theory.

The new characters are easily identifiable, especially the soldiers in Katniss's group: Tigress, Jackson, League 1 and League 2, Castor and Pollux, and Boggs. I especially liked Pollux, a former Avox, who gets a chance to retaliate against the Capitol.

The final push through the Capitol was AMAZING. Scenes like that are why I read these books in the first place.

The idea of using tracker-jacker venom to brainwash people worked perfectly within the book. It connected book 1 to book 3 on the sci-fi level, using what she already had at her disposal. A great idea.

When Katniss trained her arrow on Snow, and instead turned and shot Coin, I cheered. Amazing.

The epilogue: while not my favorite device, it worked for this book. And the closing line was beautiful. I still feel touched by it. Collins really hit the nail square on the head with that.


The Cons:

Katniss spends a lot of time at the beginning wandering around helplessly through District 13, hiding and sleeping in closets. I get that she's traumatized by what's happened to her, but she's too weak. She's become consistently weaker since book 1, and that sucks because she was such an inspiring female lead. One thing I hate about YA with female leads is that they're often weak or flawed and focus on their shortcomings way too much. That's unacceptable for male leads, and I won't accept it from female characters either. Her internal drive to overcome fear and weakness should have been stronger. There were better ways to show that the war was wearing on her.

There are far, far too many times in this book when Katniss gets injured, knocked out, hurt, whatever, and we instantly cut to her waking up in a hospital, drugged. In book 2 after she realized she'd be going back into the Hunger Games, she went over to Haymitch's and got drunk. Okay. I'll accept that. In this book, she does a lot of morphling and turns to drugs for comfort. Sure war is an atrocity, and people find different ways to cope with that. But literature is supposed to be an inspiration, a way to show us to beat those self-destructive ways of coping. There's a better medium between realism and storytelling. It got old fast, like doing that was an easy-out.

When Prim died, I was at first confused. The way she wrote that scene, it was hard to tell that it was Prim who'd rushed into range of the bombs. If I'd been reading the physical book and not the audio version, I'd have thrown it down at that point. I'll accept Snape killing Dumbledore, but I will not accept Prim Everdeen getting blown to bits by a firebomb. Hi, my name is Suzanne Collins, and I just completely negated the whole reason for my main protagonist going into the Hunger Games in the first place. And for what?

Katniss's relationship with her mother took a major backseat. We got even less time with her than we did in book 2. And after reading book 1 again, I get the feeling there was something between her and Peeta's dad once, something that didn't get a lot of resolution or acknowledgment. Overall it's not that important, but it irks me. Consider me irked.

When Coin brought the victors together and made them vote on whether or not to hold a final Hunger Games, there's no way in hell Katniss should have voted yes. She even thought of Prim and wondered if the Capitol people had kids her age. So why vote to have another game? To make them lose someone the way she did? Perhaps. But there's also the heavy thought bearing down on her that President Coin is no different from President Snow. When the leadership changed, nothing did. The votes should've been done differently to get a "yes" overall, or maybe Coin's reaction should've been different with a "no." Katniss would still have killed her. But that just made no sense.

Katniss's post-war drug bender was annoying. The pity and sadness and sorrow, sure--but you don't let someone in her condition self-medicate without supervision. They locked her in an empty room and gave her pills. She should've been under other observation.

Mrs. Everdeen disappeared after Prim died. We heard about her, but never saw her. She ended up working in a new hospital somewhere. No reconciliation with Katniss, no discussion about Prim, not even a funeral. WTF. "Hey, I lost my husband, now my baby daughter's dead. I'm starting a new job. Here's a handwritten note, XOXO, Mom."

Ditto for Gale. After he and Katniss got closer (we were even treated to a pseudo-Eclipse-esque tent scene, which sickens and infuriates me to no end, because Collins basically turned Katniss-Gale-Peeta into Bella-Edward-Jacob, and DAMMIT I'm trying to keep this brilliant franchise far, far away from the literary bowel movement called Twilight) he just disappears. The last we see of him is when he gets carted off by the Peacekeepers as Katniss is still making a run on Snow's mansion. Later we hear that oh, hey, he got a job in District 2. He's probably got a girlfriend or something too. Life's good, k thx bye! No reconciliation, no exit, nothing.

And then Peeta shows up on Katniss's doorstep. All we get is a "Well, he's never entirely the same as he was before getting hijacked, but we're in love." Suddenly all her doubts are washed away, and they end up making babies. The end, epilogue.

So there's my beef. Book 1 is still the most awesome. Book 2 delivered on the demands of a sequel to such a great book. And Book 3 did the same about 90% of the time. But for that other 10%, they really, really screwed the pooch.

It could've been perfect. But oh well. I'm still grateful to have been able to read it, and still learned loads about great storytelling. Thank you Suzanne Collins for writing a series that has affected me in a positive way like no other fiction series has. Can't wait to see what you come up with next.