212/300

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I don't know what to review this just quite yet. Just needed to share that I feel really sad after reading it.



Okay, I had the night (well 4 hours of night after I finished reading) to sleep on it and here are my thoughts.

Obviously I was really excited for this release. If excited is even the word. So when it arrived on my Nook at about 12:20, I settled in for the night.



THERE FOLLOWING IS ONE BIG SPOILER SO PLEASE DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED!



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The story starts with Katniss walking around the destroyed remains of her District, #12. Eventually they take her back to her new home, District 13. This new district (where rebels had been running the place since the Dark Days) is much like life under the Capitol, where everyone has a schedule, and a restricted amount of food to eat.



We are told from the beginning that the leaders (Plutarch Heavensbee, the Head Gamemaker at the time of the Quarter Quell and one of the leaders of the rebel force, and Alma Coin, the president of district 13) want Katniss to be the Mockingjay, the symbol of the rebellion. I was going to mention Heavensbee's assistant as well but I realized I couldn't even remember her name, since I feel like she played a large part at the beginning but then we never hear about her again. Haymitch plays a role, too, in the same confusing way him and Katniss often have a love/hate relationship. After seeing Peeta on Capitol propaganda, Katniss realizes that there cannot be a ceasefire and she must be the voice of the rebels.



There is a lot of time spent filming propaganda pieces to cut into the Capitols programming. Eventually, Katniss realizes she needs Peeta to keep going. So Gale and others go to the Capitol to find him and when they bring him back, they discover he has been brainwashed by the Capitol to hate Katniss and want to kill her. For a while, I was thinking Peeta might be dead and that this was just some kind of mutt version of him.



Katniss eventually leads the team (Gale, a semi-deranged Peeta, the new and likeable Boggs, Finnick, and other newbies) on a (unbeknownst to the team) mission to kill President Snow.



I am not going to go into too much detail here about the ending except that it was incredibly depressing. I thought the climax was strange in that they just kind of wrote Katniss off in the end as being a but nutty. I felt like there was a lot more potential there. I thought the stuff with President Snow was rather anti-climactic. I did not feel satisfied about the resolution of the relationship with Gale. I am annoyed at the little mention of Madge and her family and how that ended up. At first I thought the stuff with Peeta was glossed over too quickly (he DID try to kill her after all) but after I thought about it more, I was okay with it.



Maybe the most disturbing thing was how depressed Katniss was for most of it. Not that she shouldn't be. But God, she never seems to catch a break. And nothing truly ever seems to be okay.



Overall, I can't be disappointed in the way Collins blurs the lines between good and evil. And if it was a bad book, I doubt I would have stayed up all night reading it. But I am a little bummed. After reading some of the theories before the release of the book (namely that Madge's mother was the actual Mockingjay) I was a little upset that it didn't take that direction. Ultimately, a happy ending was not possible so I guess this was the closest thing. I am still digesting a lot of it and maybe my rating will change or I will need to add more. But now I just feel sad about it. Which I guess means it was an amazing book.



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