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]

That is very strange. I have had characters spend time in hospitals, but I tend to deposit them there, and then pick up the story when they emerge.

I am also a little confused as to what traumatized her so much that it changed her entire personality... Prim doesn't die until toward the end, right? Soldiers can do an entire tour of combat duty without lapsing into sleepy despair, so I don't get why doing the Hunger Games again would HAVE to do that to her. I don't but that it's realism. There is a very wide range of realistic reactions.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Prim dies at the very end, not at the beginning—which I also had an issue with, because that was Katniss' worst fear realized, her greatest trauma, and we didn't even get to see the aftermath of that. It happened, and then there were two very short chapters after that, one of which was "so I married Peeta, and a few years later he convinced me to have kids, the end." It felt like, having set up protecting Prim as The Purpose Of Her Life, skipping the aftermath of Prim's death was very strange.

I think the explanation for Katniss' despair was supposed to be finding out that Thirteen was imperfect too (the leader of Thirteen, Coin, is not a very nice lady, and on top of that the book hates politicians always and Thirteen naturally does have some), but since that realization happened offstage, the impact was badly muffled. I might've bought her sleepy hopelessness better if I'd seen her realization that Thirteen was a bunch of haters, but I didn't. I heard about it after the fact.

I don't know.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

(Also, on the theme of "realistic reactions," thumbie reminds me of something that drove me bananas: at the end, when the Districts have won their revolution, they discuss whether to have a regular Hunger Games in which children from the Capitol have to participate. And Katniss votes yes, in what seemed to me like a truly spectacular undermining of character, especially as Katniss has seen that people from the Captiol are/can be real people and not faceless monsters—she actually did like Cinna and her prep team, for instance. It was like they took the last thing I liked about Katniss—her most basic sense of compassion and fairness—and stomped all over it. By the end, the Katniss I had liked was utterly gone. And maybe that was the point, but hell, I don't have to like it.)