Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

[coraa]

Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games), by Suzanne Collins

This is the third (and final) book in the "Hunger Games" series, and as such it's difficult to talk about without spoilers for Mockingjay, and almost impossible to talk about without spoilers for the prior books. So I'll keep the outside-the-spoiler-cut brief: I still think this trilogy is worth reading, but this final book left me feeling curiously deflated. I won't say it was a bad book, or that I didn't enjoy it, but I really, really wanted to love it and I... didn't. Couldn't. I liked it okay, but after the lead-up, it left me feeling disappointed.



So, spoilery: I confess, the first thing that jarred me was starting the book so long after the end of Catching Fire. When the book begins, Katniss has settled in at District Thirteen, and has become disenchanted with it. My first thought was: why not show us that: Katniss' grief, her hope and fear, her slow realization that Thirteen is better than the arena but is certainly not paradise?

I'm sorry to say, that started a trend that explains why I'm disappointed in the book: Katniss doesn't do much, and we don't see her growth and change and the way she learns. Indeed, she spends the first half of the book, at least, in a grey hopelessness, skipping trainings and classes and sleeping in supply closets.

And, well, here's the thing: I loved The Hunger Games because I loved Katniss, her strength and fire, the way she genuinely cared for people (Prim, Rue, Gale, her mother, even Peeta), the way the world tried to seize her agency from her and she took it back in a defiant and genuinely dramatic show: that if they would not let her live on her own terms then she would die on her own terms.

And that Katniss just... wasn't there. The Katniss of the first half of Mockingjay seemed to believe that everyone was equally corrupt, so why bother with anything? Seemed to believe the government when it told her she was just a pawn. Seemed not to want to, well... to bother. She spent most of her time just doing, well, nothing. And when obstacles were thrown in her path, like Peeta's hijacking, she just rolled over and gave up.

That was not my Katniss. And tearing the heart out of Katniss meant tearing the heart out of the book, for me.

I've heard arguments that Katniss' inability and unwillingness to do anything was realistic because Katniss was (understandably) traumatized. But here's the thing: for one thing, PTSD doesn't always take the same form, and there's no reason that traumatized!Katniss had to equal passive!Katniss or hopeless!Katniss. And choosing that particular symptom of trauma felt to me like a bad dramatic choice, because (and yes, I keep harping on this) it left us with a main, POV character who spent all her time sleeping in supply closets.

And one of the upshots of that was that we heard, rather than saw, much of the action. Which is always frustrating.

For another thing, just because 'hopeless and bored' is how your main character is feeling, that doesn't mean that that's how you have to make your audience feel. There's a brilliantly funny scene in Kushner's Swordspoint, in which the POV character is watching a deadly dull play... and yet Kushner doesn't bore us: she writes the scene extremely funny. (I seem to remember that Richard spent the entire boring play trying to figure out whether the parrot on stage was alive or stuffed.) Obviously 'screamingly funny' would be the wrong mood here, but 'bored and depressed' was not a terribly compelling mood to inflict on the reader, either.

Around the halfway point, it picked up, as Katniss actually started doing things. But by then I was disenchanted with this girl whose goals were all selfish (Thirteen was nearly as bad as Panem, you see, so why bother with anything bigger than yourself?) and who had no patience at all (come on, expecting Peeta to recover in forty-eight hours is ludicrous, and she should have known that). It was just. I don't know. It felt like the narrative tore the heart out of Katniss, but doing so also tore the heart out of the narrative.

And then, of course, the ending. I've always been nominally more Team Peeta than Team Gale (because love seemed to make Peeta vulnerable, but it made Gale demanding, and I don't find demanding attractive at all), but I'm mostly Team Sweetheart, You Don't Need To Pick A Love Interest Right This Second. And the ending, in which Katniss is hit with the massive trauma of losing Prim (which was the thing that started the whole plot int he first place!) and then there's a timeskip and she's married to Peeta... it didn't work for me.

I would rather have skipped Catching Fire, had Mockingjay be the Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy, and then had a third book in which Katniss dealt with the pain and horror of losing Prim and recovered to the point where I could actually buy her marrying Peeta.

Add to this that Collins appears to think that all politics are evil, and that there's no real point in overthrowing the government because the next government will be just as bad, and... yeah. I was left deflated, not so much emotionally wrung out as just empty of feeling about the book.

Sigh. I don't want to make it sound like it was a terrible book. One of Collins' strengths is creating nuanced and three-dimensional secondary characters, and this book continued that trend. And it certainly was realistic that everything wasn't sunshine and roses. It just... I don't know. It did not satisfy me, as a reader, I guess.

Which is a shame, because I really did want to love it.

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

So, I totally read spoilers for this (not just yours) but because I haven't read the book, I was unable to argue with all the people saying "It would be unrealistic for Katniss to be active, because she's traumatized and that makes you passive."

I've heard arguments that Katniss' inability and unwillingness to do anything was realistic because Katniss was (understandably) traumatized. But here's the thing: for one thing, PTSD doesn't always take the same form, and there's no reason that traumatized!Katniss had to equal passive!Katniss or hopeless!Katniss. And choosing that particular symptom of trauma felt to me like a bad dramatic choice, because (and yes, I keep harping on this) it left us with a main, POV character who spent all her time sleeping in supply closets.

Yes! Traumatization takes many forms! It can also make people inbued with manic or self-destructive energy, for instance. Or it can not hit until long, long after the crisis is over.

Katniss struck me, in the first two books, as very much the type of person who grits her teeth and perseveres and compartmentalizes and denies, and could take an enormous amount of trauma without it having a visible (to outsiders) effect until a very long time afterward. As in years.

Seriously, sleeping in supply closets? I had heard people complaining that she spends a long time drugged and in the hospital - can BOTH be true?

[thumbie.livejournal.com]

Amen to this post. The only way the book makes sense to me is that it's a PTSD thing and not much survives war intact, like how they got Gale conveniently out of the romantic running and made Katniss's whole involvement moot in one fel swoop. But yes, she never dealt with grief over Prim, i mean they had her locked up and insane but that wasn't really enough. And having her vote yes on hunger games with the Capital kids was a huge character about face. It really did feel like we spent the whole book watching someones soul die and while that moves with the anti war message it's a bit unsatisfying.

Rachel you got knives right?

But

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the book, but I really like this review, because you are up-front about both what you disliked personally and in terms of literary structure, and how it was connected. I think tearing the heart out of Katniss meant tearing the heart out of the book, for me is the, well, heart of your argument, and that's really good.

(And less objectively: the sister DIES? Right at the end? And we don't see her reaction and the marriage sort of, well, fixes it? And she votes _for_ the Games continuing? ....Erk. I always dislike that 'don't give the audience what they want, give them what they need' fake tough-macho defense of tragic endings, because you can do tragic without making everything seem pointless.)

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

I agree with a lot of what you say. It hadn't occurred to me to have Prim die earlier so we could deal with the aftermath, but of course that would have been the more powerful book. Or even to go on to a book 4, or some hybrid situation--honestly, an entire book could have been gotten out of the post-Snow turn-over, and the assassination of Coin. Or at least half a book. I don't know.

I wonder if this is really what Collins was going for. I'm sure she wanted to portray the grimness and pointlessness of war, but...