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. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what’s worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss’s family, not her friends, not the people of District 12. Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final installment of Suzanne Collins’s groundbreaking The Hunger Games trilogy promises to be one of the most talked about books of the year.Product Description
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. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what’s worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss’s family, not her friends, not the people of District 12. Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final installment of Suzanne Collins’s groundbreaking The Hunger Games trilogy promises to be one of the most talked about books of the year.
A Q&A with Suzanne Collins, Author of Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games)
Q: You have said from the start that The Hunger Games story was intended as a trilogy. Did it actually end the way you planned it from the beginning?
A: Very much so. While I didn’t know every detail, of course, the arc of the story from gladiator game, to revolution, to war, to the eventual outcome remained constant throughout the writing process.
Q: We understand you worked on the initial screenplay for a film to be based on
The Hunger Games. What is the biggest difference between writing a novel and writing a screenplay?
A: There were several significant differences. Time, for starters. When you’re adapting a novel into a two-hour movie you can’t take everything with you. The story has to be condensed to fit the new form. Then there’s the question of how best to take a book told in the first person and present tense and transform it into a satisfying dramatic experience. In the novel, you never leave Katniss for a second and are privy to all of her thoughts so you need a way to dramatize her inner world and to make it possible for other characters to exist outside of her company. Finally, there’s the challenge of how to present the violence while still maintaining a PG-13 rating so that your core audience can view it. A lot of things are acceptable on a page that wouldn’t be on a screen. But how certain moments are depicted will ultimately be in the director’s hands.
Q: Are you able to consider future projects while working on
The Hunger Games, or are you immersed in the world you are currently creating so fully that it is too difficult to think about new ideas?
A: I have a few seeds of ideas floating around in my head but–given that much of my focus is still on
The Hunger Games–it will probably be awhile before one fully emerges and I can begin to develop it.
Q: The Hunger Games is an annual televised event in which one boy and one girl from each of the twelve districts is forced to participate in a fight-to-the-death on live TV. What do you think the appeal of reality television is–to both kids and adults?
A: Well, they’re often set up as games and, like sporting events, there’s an interest in seeing who wins. The contestants are usually unknown, which makes them relatable. Sometimes they have very talented people performing. Then there’s the voyeuristic thrill—watching people being humiliated, or brought to tears, or suffering physically–which I find very disturbing. There’s also the potential for desensitizing the audience, so that when they see real tragedy playing out on, say, the news, it doesn’t have the impact it should.
Q: If you were forced to compete in the Hunger Games, what do you think your special skill would be?
A: Hiding. I’d be scaling those trees like Katniss and Rue. Since I was trained in sword-fighting, I guess my best hope would be to get hold of a rapier if there was one available. But the truth is I’d probably get about a four in Training.
Q: What do you hope readers will come away with when they read The Hunger Games trilogy?
A: Questions about how elements of the books might be relevant in their own lives. And, if they’re disturbing, what they might do about them.
Q: What were some of your favorite novels when you were a teen?
A: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Boris by Jaapter Haar
Germinal by Emile Zola
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
(Photo © Cap Pryor)
List Price: $ 17.99
Price: $ 6.95
Popular Tags:
Unexpected Direction, but Perfection,
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.
Was this review helpful to you?
|The detractors of this book wanted a fairytale,
To start I am a 47 year old Veteran.
I have read a lot of the bad reviews for this last book and I see a theme running through them all. They didn’t get their fairytale ending and the people they liked didn’t end up the way they wanted. Well If you are looking for a fairytale read Harry Potter. If you want a realistic book on how war really is and how people will sacrifice themselves to save their country, then this is for you.
The love triangle between the three main characters resolves itself in the best way that I could see possible. The way each one would react to the horrors of war were obvious from book one. I don’t want to include spoilers so Ill just say, read this with an expectation of a realistic portrayal of the characters and how the war would change them. The ending on a personal level, is not necessarily a happy one, but it is a realistic one. From a “Big Picture” perspective I think it was a happy ending. To expect that all of the main characters could live “Happily Ever After” after surviving what happened in all three books is unrealistic.
Was this review helpful to you?
|MAJOR, MAJOR SPOILERS!!! Read ahead at your own discretion!,
I’m going to say it again – this review has major spoilers. I simply don’t think that I can discuss my disappointment with the book, and the series over all now, without actually discussing the events of the book. So, if you haven’t read the book yet, and you don’t want to know what happens, don’t read this review!!! You have been warned.
First, let me start with the positives. This book was very fast paced and hard to put down, like the rest of the series. I read it very swiftly, with few breaks. Some of the supporting characters develop beautifully in this book. Finnick especially really rounded out in this book. Because you care about a lot of the supporting characters, you really care if they die. That’s a big thing for me. When reading a book about war, I don’t want to feel like I’m trapped in one of those shooting video games, where a death only means more points. In this book, most of the deaths were gut wrenching. You REALLY felt their loss. That might upset some people, but for me it was one of the strong points of the book. There also were deaths where you didn’t care, because both you and Katniss were too numb at this point. That also was a strong point for me. It made the war feel that much more real and horrible. The war is not simply about good guys and bad guys. There are numerous shades of grey. District 13 is more than just the good guys sweeping in. I liked that.
Now, on to the negatives.
One of the main reasons I did not like this book was I didn’t feel it completed Katniss’s character arc, or did justice to her as a character. This sounds like I’m quibbling, but I’m not. It’s a major flaw in the book. In fantasy and science fiction, the main character’s inner struggle has to mirror the world’s outer struggle. The series is about revolting against an evil, freedom suppressing government and instating a new one in its place. Therefore, Katniss has to move from being an extremely resilient and unpredictable pawn to being in full control of her life. Otherwise the full meaning of the revolution is weakened, if it is not reflected in the emotional journey of the character.
But instead Katniss remains an unpredictable pawn, manipulated by outside forces, struggling to retain her identity when she has no true control over her life. That she’s manipulated by 13 rather than President Snow only adds salt to the wound. She’s far too passive, in the book where she should be the most active. She can only react, not act. She reacts to others decisions, never making her own.
That’s fine for the first two books. But in the third book Katniss needs to mature. She needs to develop as a character, and really have control over her talents and her future. She needs to undergo the emotional journey of the revolution, and be the human face of what is happening in the country. But that doesn’t happen, hence my problem with the book. Instead, Katniss is plopped into yet another situation where she is manipulated and used for others advantage, and she has to survive. This time it is being District 13′s Mockingjay. Katniss is used to spur the other districts into revolution. At first she doesn’t want to be the Mockingjay, because she doesn’t trust District 13. Then, after seeing the realities of the war, she decides to go ahead with it and be their Mockingjay. All right. But it’s past time for Katniss to decide to be used by other people. She needs to shape her fate for herself at this point. We’ve had two books where she had to survive others decisions. Now she needs to start making her own decisions. But the most she does is set conditions. ‘I’ll be your Mockingjay, if you don’t kill the other victors”. She doesn’t decide her be HER Mockingjay. She doesn’t make the revolution her own, the way Gale does. That is Katniss reacting to District 13′s needs, not acting based on her own.
This was at the beginning of the book, so I could have forgiven it if Katniss had gone on and taken more and more control of the Revolution after that. She has the power to. She is an incredibly powerful person. And she doesn’t do that. She does what 13 wants her to do, only deviating impulsively. 13 takes to to 8, to film her. Katniss jumps into the fighting when she’s not supposed to. She asserts her independence a little, but only within 13′s boundaries. She never sets her own boundaries. Katniss even realizes that she has power in that scene. But she does nothing with it. She doesn’t say; “I have power. I can move people. I’m going to use my status as a Mockingjay to ensure that the revolution is successful and the new government never repeats the horrors of the old.” She simply continues to be what 13 wants her to be; that is a tool for the good of the revolution.
This happens consistently. The climax of the book should have been the height of Katniss’s independence. She should have figured out how to use her charisma. She should be…
Read more
Was this review helpful to you?
|