Mockingjay: The Hunger Games, Book 3
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My name is Katniss Everdeen. Why am I not dead? I should be dead.
Katniss Everdeen, girl on fire, has survived, even though her home has been destroyed. Gale has escaped. Katniss’ family is safe. Peeta has been captured by the Capitol. District 13 really does exist. There are rebels. There are new leaders. A revolution is unfolding.
It is by design that Katniss was rescued from the arena in the cruel and haunting Quarter Quell, and it is by design that she has long been part of the revolution without knowing it. District 13 has come out of the shadows and is plotting to overthrow the Capitol. Everyone, it seems, has had a hand in the carefully laid plans – except Katniss.
The success of the rebellion hinges on Katniss’ willingness to be a pawn, to accept responsibility for countless lives, and to change the course of the future of Panem. To do this, she must put aside her feelings of anger and distrust. She must become the rebels’ Mockingjay – no matter what the personal cost.
Karissa Eckert –
Excellent conclusion; stays true to Katniss’s trait of being a survivor
This is the third, and final, book in The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. If you read the first two books, you will read this one. All I can say is to be prepared for one heck of a ride. A lot happens in this book and Collins doesn’t hold off on killing off a lot of people.The book starts where Catching Fire left off. Katniss is in District 13 with Gale, her mom, and her sister Prim. The Rebel group based in District 13 is trying to get Katniss to take up the Mockingjay symbol and become the face of their revolution. Katniss is unsure if she wants to go this route or not. Peeta is still missing and presumed captured by President Snow and being held in the Capital. Katniss’s journey eventually leads to the capital itself and a final face-off with President Snow.This is a hard book to review without spoilers but I will give it my best shot. The pace of this book is relentless. Collins does not pull punches when it comes to killing off large groups of people, as well as people we love and care about. This is a dark book, and that is putting it mildly.As far as characterization goes we begin to see even more of what defines Katniss as a character; she is not sentimental, she is a survivor foremost and that it what sets her apart from others. A lot of the decisions made by Katniss in this book are driven by that personality trait. In fact at one point Gale and Peeta are discussing Katniss and who she will “choose”. Gale sums it up perfectly when he says something to the effect of “Katniss will choose whoever she can’t survive without.”On to other characters. The ruthlessness we saw in Gale at the end of the Catching Fire is built upon in this book. Gale is ruthless and practical to the point of dislike at times. He begins to look like a character that likes what Katniss stands for, rather than who she is. At the end of book two I was Team Gale all the way. I thought that Gale and Katniss had more in common in survival instincts and could pull off a good relationship based on those characteristics. As this book starts and continues, we see a side of Gale that is more ruthless and dispassionate than ever before.In order to avoid spoilers I won’t say much about Peeta, except that he is back in the story for the second half of the book.Collins does an excellent job at showing both sides of the story. You get to see both the good the rebel forces do, and the harm they cause in rebelling against the Capital. As Katniss and team enter the capital, Collins relates the Capital takeover as yet another type of dome just like previous “Hunger Games” this is an interesting idea and ties the three novels together well. In each of them we see our teams of characters struggling to stay alive, doing things no one should have to do. In each book there are brutal deaths.There’s quite the twist at the end of this book. People may be surprised at who Katniss kills. All I have to say about this is that I was satisfied with the choice Katniss made, and had actually been hoping that Collins would have it play out that way. Katniss’s actions at the end seemed like the best way to follow Katniss’s beliefs, while trying to ensure the best ending for humanity as a whole.The epilogue was interesting. It was kind of nice to get a definitive ending to everything that played out before. It wrapped things up nicely. Still, I didn’t think the epilogue was necessary and I think the book would have actually been a bit better and more thought-provoking without it. As with the previous books the writing style of this book was incredibly readable and engaging; no matter people think of the plot, you have to admit Collins is one heck of a great writer.Overall I thought this was an excellent conclusion to the series. Readers may not like how some of things play-out; but I thought they played out realistically and I liked the decisions Katniss made at the end…I thought her decisions really stayed true to the core personality trait of her character, which was to survive. I am eagerly awaiting whatever Collins comes up with next.
A. R. Bovey –
Unexpected Direction, but Perfection (Potential spoilers, but pretty vague)
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.
Fer Caudillo –
En perfectas condiciones y justo en el tiempo programado…. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
giovana rufini –
Veio rápido, consegui acompanhar todas as etapas de entrega dos Estados Unidos até o Brasil e veio em perfeito estado 10 dias antes do prazo!!!!☺️
Seema –
Not a single damage to any of the books i ordered….and great book…i recommend u to read.
Pache –
Por eso lo compré. La lectura se hace muy amena. Lo volvi a leer luego de varios años.
Phillip A. Campbell –
Just as like my Catching Fire review, this book is magnificent. People can argue about the ending, how it was “rushed” but I find she made it perfectly. She gave the reader a sense of what happened, how the “Star Crossed Lovers” ended up, and give freedom to the reader for some specific things. Not so much that it feels rushed, but amazing. The book is just as long as its predecessors 391 pgs. The book comes with many twists and turns, and has an extremely realistic ending. It is not your typical love story. Twilight is baloney, this is extremely well crafted, and a successful ending only adds to the experience. The ending is true to the characters, and very great. Like Catching Fire, the quality is amazing, nothing wrong with the pages or hard cover, slip cover was also not ripped. The book gets 5 STARS.