Review by New York Times Review
WHAT if the future were a giant reality television show in which children were pitted against each other in an elaborate fight to the death, in which politics, war and entertainment had finally become indistinguishable? This is the question raised by Suzanne Collins's brutal and absorbing "Hunger Games" trilogy, and answered in the much anticipated final installment, "Mockingjay." The premise of the series is that a corrupt and decadent Capitol rules over 12 impoverished districts in Panem, in the ruins of North America. Every year the Capitol authorities stage a "reaping," in which a girl and a boy from each district are chosen by lottery to be tributes in the Hunger Games. When her younger sister is picked, the heroine, Katniss Everdeen, volunteers to take her place, and with the others is styled, trained and then placed in a spectacularly designed high-tech arena, to fight in the televised games until only one contestant survives. Though the "Hunger Games" trilogy has by now won many adult readers - there are 5.6 million copies of the series in print in the United States and Canada - it is the perfect teenage story with its exquisitely refined rage against the cruel and arbitrary power of the adult world. One might think that "Mockingjay," in which Katniss is finally saved from the Games and delivered to the revolutionary forces to become their figurehead, would offer some redemption, but it turns out the rebels are just as morally ambiguous as Panem's leaders. The full-scale revolution is being sold on television to the disheartened and oppressed districts, in carefully produced spots with labels like "Because you know who they are and what they do." "Mockingjay" is not as impeccably plotted as "The Hunger Games," but nonetheless retains its fierce, chilly fascination. At its best the trilogy channels the political passion of "1984," the memorable violence of "A Clockwork Orange," the imaginative ambience of "The Chronicles of Narnia" and the detailed inventiveness of "Harry Potter." The specifics of the dystopian universe, and the fabulous pacing of the complicated plot, give the books their strange, dark charisma. It would take too long to catalog the elaborate gadgets and gizmos and creatures and torments that Collins has devised, but among them are the jabberjays, birds that reproduce the screams of loved ones being tortured, to rattle the tributes; the brilliantly conceived costumes that seem to trail flames as Katniss rides into the arena for her first Hunger Games; an arena in the shape of a lethal ticking clock face; and tracker jackers, genetically altered wasps that can hijack memories and distort them to change the very essence of who a person is. The trilogy balances seriousness with special effects, a fundamental furious darkness with fast-paced storytelling, so that the books manage to be simultaneously disturbing and fun. They contain a sharp satire of celebrity culture, mindless tabloidism and decadence, as well as crusading teenagers trying to save the world; but they also resist our hunger for clear definitions of good and evil, our sentimental need for a worthwhile cause, our desire for happy or simple endings, or even for the characters we like not to be killed or tortured or battered or bruised in graphic ways. Like the evil Capitol that controls and shadows its world, the trilogy tends to use the things we are attached to against us. THE 17-year-old girl at the center of the revolution is a great character without being exactly likable. Katniss is bossy, moody, bratty, demanding, prickly. She treats the world with an explosive aggression that is a little out of the ordinary, to say the least. She greets one admirer's expression of love by knocking him down, slams a door on another's face during an argument, shoots an arrow at a panel of judges before the Games begin and threatens a mentor with a knife when he says something she doesn't like. In short, she belongs to a recent tribe of popular heroines: the small, difficult teenage girl who manifests enormous physical and moral strength. She is both murderer and victim, somehow representing female strength and female vulnerability all mingled and entwined, dangerously, ambiguously, into one. She is Pippi Longstocking. She is the girl with the dragon tattoo. She is mesmerizing in her way of defying authority, antisocial, courageous, angry, self-involved and yet somehow sweepingly sympathetic. Katniss also has not one but two love interests, Peeta and Gale, and she vacillates between them until the very last pages, when she somewhat randomly ends up with one. She can't choose, and gets sulky when anyone suggests she should. They are both impossibly devoted, brave and handsome, and the narrative never lets either get the upper hand. Indeed, the book's dogged and perverse resistance of the normal romantic plot in which the heroine genuinely prefers one of her suitors is one of its more appealing and original features. The entire series, and "Mockingjay" in particular, also offers an investigation of the future frontier of the screen: There are cameras everywhere recording at the outer limits of experience. At one point Katniss says, "I look to the screen, hoping to see them recording some wave of reconciliation going through the crowd. Instead I watch myself get shot on television." And so there is the plot, and there is the televised version of the plot, the events themselves and the making of propaganda, and in this double storytelling the book makes its weird graceful way toward the denouement. After Katniss's daring acts of battle, and all varieties of exhaustion and physical disfigurement, her team of stylists is constantly trying to "remake her to Beauty Base Zero" - the way she would look if she got out of bed looking "flawless but natural." In other words, the books offer a brutal meditation on how absurd and bloody and prurient our worst impulses are for a generation that is interested in the outcome of "America's Next Top Model." Watching young people kill each other might seem a little sick or unhinged, and this is not an author to delicately avert her gaze. Our voyeurism is fully engaged in these books, but so intelligently, adeptly engaged that it does not feel trashy or gratuitous. As Katniss herself says in "Mockingjay," "There are much worse games to play." Katniss is both murderer and victim. She is Pippi Longstocking and the girl with the dragon tattoo. Katie Roiphe is a professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 12, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The highly anticipated conclusion to the Hunger Games trilogy does not disappoint. If anything, it may give readers more than they bargained for: in action, in love, and in grief. When the book opens, Katniss has survived her ordeal at the Quarter Quell, and she and her family are safe in District 13. Gale is there as well, but Peeta is being held at the Capitol as President Snow's very special prisoner. Events move quickly, but realization unfolds slowly as Katniss learns that she has been a pawn in more ways than she ever supposed and that her role as the face of the revolution is one with unanticipated consequences, including a climbing death toll for which she holds herself personally responsible. Collins does several things brilliantly, not the least of which is to provide heart-stopping chapter endings that turn events on their heads and then twist them once more. But more ambitious is the way she brings readers to questions and conclusions about war throughout the story. There's nothing didactic here, and the rush of the narrative sometimes obscures what message there is. Yet readers will instinctively understand what Katniss knows in her soul, that war mixes all the slogans and justifications, the deceptions and plans, the causes and ideals into an unsavory stew whose taste brings madness. That there is still a human spirit yearning for good is the book's primrose of hope.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This concluding volume in Collins's Hunger Games trilogy accomplishes a rare feat, the last installment being the best yet, a beautifully orchestrated and intelligent novel that succeeds on every level. At the end of Catching Fire, Katniss had been dramatically rescued from the Quarter Quell games; her fellow tribute, Peeta, has presumably been taken prisoner by the Capitol. Now the rebels in District 13 want Katniss (who again narrates) to be the face of the revolution, a propaganda role she's reluctant to play. One of Collins's many achievements is skillfully showing how effective such a poster girl can be, with a scene in which Katniss visits the wounded, cameras rolling to capture (and retransmit) her genuine outrage at the way in which war victimizes even the noncombatants. Beyond the sharp social commentary and the nifty world building, there's a plot that doesn't quit: nearly every chapter ends in a reversal-of-fortune cliffhanger. Readers get to know characters better, including Katniss's sister and mother, and Plutarch Heavensbee, former Head Gamemaker, now rebel filmmaker, directing the circus he hopes will bring down the government, a coup possible precisely because the Capitol's residents are too pampered to mount a defense. "In return for full bellies and entertainment," he tells Katniss, explaining the Latin phrase panem et circenses, "people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power." Finally, there is the romantic intrigue involving Katniss, Peeta and Gale, which comes to a resolution that, while it will break some hearts, feels right. In short, there's something here for nearly every reader, all of it completely engrossing. Ages 12-up. (Sept.) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.
Review by Library Journal Review
In its first week of publication, this third book in Collins's "Hunger" trilogy rocketed to the top of the best-seller lists, proving that teen-reading adults are interested in something other than vampires and boy wizards. For the uninitiated, The Hunger Games (2008), which began the series, posited a world where the United States is no more and a cruel capitol rules over 12 districts that must each offer an annual tribute of two children for a televised fight-to-the-death. In this final volume, a rebel movement goes to war against the capitol. The costs are high, causing the reader to question the moral rightness of any war, even one against a ruler as evil as President Snow, whose breath smells of "blood and roses." For the past week, Mockingjay has been the topic of backroom discussion in my libraries as friends and coworkers debate its shocking conclusion.-Angelina Benedetti, "35 Going on 13," BookSmack! 9/16/10 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 7 Up-In this final volume in the saga, Katniss has been rescued by the resistance only to learn that her home has been destroyed and that her friend Peeta has been captured. In District 13 she accepts the role of Mockingjay, the rebellion's symbol, but is she still a pawn in a larger game? Audio version available from Scholastic Audio. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Katniss has been spirited away from the carnage of the recent Quarter Quell (see Catching Fire, rev. 9/09) to District 13, thought to have been destroyed years ago, but very much alive and kicking. As all of the districts move into open rebellion against the Capitol, Katniss reluctantly but resolutely accepts her role as the figurehead of the movement. As she heals, both physically and emotionally, from her previous ordeal, she works through not only the ethical minefield of warfare but also her complicated relationships with Peeta and Gale. One last desperate mission takes Katniss and company to the Capitol, where she hopes to deal a mortal blow to President Snow and his oppressive regime. Collins has always been able to generate an extraordinary amount of suspense and surprise from a single narrative arc, and that's certainly true once again. But the events of this story play out on a much more epic scale (rapid changes in time and place and a larger cast of characters), almost demanding more than the single point of view (Katniss's) Collins employs. Some may be disappointed that this concluding volume features less action and more introspection than the earlier books; others may wish for a different resolution, particularly where romance is concerned. All things considered, however, Collins has brought the most compelling science-fiction saga of the past several years to a satisfying and provocative conclusion. jonathan hunt (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
