Mockingjay

Mockingjay
Suzanne Collins
Toronto: Scholastic, Inc., 2010
400 pages

Against more odds than you can hope to calculate, Katniss has survived the Hunger Games twice.  Rescued by the people of the long-lost District 13, Katniss chooses to become their pawn in the uprising against the Capitol in the small hope that she can save Peeta, who has been captured by President Snow. Not all is as it seems, and Katniss will soon have to face impossible choices to save the people she holds most dear.

The only reason I didn't finish this book in one sitting was because I had to go to work today. I finished the last two chapters on my break. It's that good. Terrifying in places, perhaps geared towards older teens and adults even more so than the other two novels in the series, but good nevertheless.

I've heard a lot of readers say that this book disappointed them - the end was depressing, it wasn't what they had hoped for, the first book was better. While the first book was my favourite by far, I think the reason that Mockingjay wasn't as well received as the other books in the series is that the tone of the story changed - it became too real. Civil war is something we see in the news all the time now - some of us have even been personally touched by its tragedies. Having Katniss, Peeta, Gale and the rest of the crew fighting a civil war, losing friends and loved ones at every step, is a little too familiar to us. The Games in the first two books were foreign - left only to the power of our imaginations. War is real, it's not a game, and people die. But life for some goes on, and at the end of it all, Mockingjay does leave us with some hope for our future.

Book Count: 17 read, 183 to go.