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| | Description | Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she's made it out of the bloody arena alive, she's still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what's worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss's family, not her friends, not the people of District 12. Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final installment of Suzanne Collins's groundbreaking The Hunger Games trilogy promises to be one of the most talked about books of the year. | |
| | Product Details | | Author: | Suzanne Collins | | Hardcover: | 400 pages | | Publisher: | Scholastic Press | | Publication Date: | August 24, 2010 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 0439023513 | | Product Length: | 8.3 inches | | Product Width: | 5.8 inches | | Product Height: | 1.3 inches | | Product Weight: | 1.1 pounds | | Package Length: | 8.3 inches | | Package Width: | 5.4 inches | | Package Height: | 1.5 inches | | Package Weight: | 1.45 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 2285 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 2285 customer reviews )
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1615 of 1773 found the following review helpful:
 Unexpected Direction, but Perfection (Potential spoilers, but pretty vague) Aug 24, 2010
By A. R. Bovey
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.
321 of 368 found the following review helpful:
The detractors of this book wanted a fairytale Sep 13, 2010
By DAVID OTOOLE
To start I am a 47 year old Veteran.
I have read a lot of the bad reviews for this last book and I see a theme running through them all. They didn't get their fairytale ending and the people they liked didn't end up the way they wanted. Well If you are looking for a fairytale read Harry Potter. If you want a realistic book on how war really is and how people will sacrifice themselves to save their country, then this is for you.
The love triangle between the three main characters resolves itself in the best way that I could see possible. The way each one would react to the horrors of war were obvious from book one. I don't want to include spoilers so Ill just say, read this with an expectation of a realistic portrayal of the characters and how the war would change them. The ending on a personal level, is not necessarily a happy one, but it is a realistic one. From a "Big Picture" perspective I think it was a happy ending. To expect that all of the main characters could live "Happily Ever After" after surviving what happened in all three books is unrealistic.
39 of 44 found the following review helpful:
 Hugely Disappointing. Oct 24, 2010
By Megan Hicks
I enjoyed Hunger Games a lot, and Catching Fire as well (though I thought that Catching Fire had some flaws). These flaws became all the more apparent in Mockingjay, where the fast pace and any character development was quickly derailed. The main problems can be summed up thusly:
1) Limitations of the point of view. In Hunger Games, Katniss's first person POV helped keep up the suspense. You only knew what she knew in the arena, and you read to find out what was going on. When were the Careers going to find her and try to kill her? What were Peeta's motivations? Etc, etc. This also worked in Catching Fire. However, much of Mockingjay is spent with people explaining what happened off-screen to Katniss. She gets told things second hand a lot. This really bothered me. I wanted to see the action take place, not be told about it. What little action there is in the beginning is the awkward, staged propaganda pieces which make little sense. Which brings me to the next point.
2) The action in the back third of the book was poorly written. I think it was rushed. At no point in Hunger Games did I have trouble understanding what was going on. I had to reread parts several times to understand what had happened, particularly Finnick's and Prim's deaths. The last part was basically one big swirl of confusion, choppily written and edited. What's more, the constant need to tie everything back to the Hunger Games got old really fast with the "pods are like being back at the Games!" thing. Uhhh no.
3) Gale's rather odious character derailment. I was indifferent to who Katniss ended up declaring her love for, but all the ploys that Collins used to get Gale out of the picture just felt cheap to me. Him possibly having a part in the bomb that killed her sister? Katniss needed that to realize that he wasn't right for her? That's cheap. She should have had to struggle to reach that conclusion on her own, rather than making Gale not only uncomfortably, if indirectly, responsible for Prim's death on top of having Gale be a jerk to Katniss through most of the book. Collins set up a perfect plot for Katniss to realize she loved Peeta. Taking his love away from her should have really finally opened up her eyes to what she felt, and had her try to earn him, but this is relatively glossed over.
4) Collins seems to have forgotten that the readers see the world through Katniss's eyes. And hollow, inactive, depressed, and drugged up eyes are not really the best eyes to see the world through. A different writer might have been able to make this work, but keeping Katniss's depression and lethargy compelling was just outside the scope of her gifts. She's much better at other things that she didn't capitalize on. Katniss is horribly traumatized -- as she should be -- but wandering, self-centered thoughts about how traumatized she is don't make for very interesting reading in Collins's hands. After a while, I was really starting to hate Katniss, and how she seemed unwilling to sacrifice anything for the rebellion. Everything seemed to come back to her. Oh, Haymitch manipulated me in the arena! How terrible! It's not like he wasn't trying to do something good for the world at large by doing so! These thoughts, all of which we're privy to, got wearing fast.
I think Collins needed more time to write this book. The ending in particular felt extremely rushed. In the end, it wasn't the worst book I've ever read, but it was so far from living up to the promise of the first two installments that I just hated it.
130 of 156 found the following review helpful:
A sloppily written finale to a great series Sep 13, 2010
By Regina Little
I found the entire story to be very sloppily written.
In some ways, yes, I agree that this story is a war-story, and some of the scenes were rather poignant and helped invoked the theme that yes, war really really sucks. There's no doubt about it.
However, I don't think this was great literature. Actually, comparing it to Twilight, with such scenes as the "let's talk about who the girl is going to pick while she's asleep" and the fact that whenever a major event occurs Katniss is conveniently in the hospital or unconscious and needs to be told about it later (whatever happened to show, not tell, Collins?), is not that far of a stretch. The characters that we fell in love with throughout the series, the reason the Hunger Games was wildly popular in the first place, were mysteriously missing the entire last book. Katniss was hollow and dead, Peeta was absent and even absent when he was there, Gale STILL had no personality, and Haymitch lost his sarcasm and spunk. I'm serious about Gale: whenever he talked or ranted about the Capital, it was like Katniss pulled a switch, refusing to let the reader understand this character at all. And Haymitch, while in the first books he seemed to have his hand in all the cookie jars, in the last book he was strangely uninvolved in the entire scheme to take over the Capital. All of them were "there" by name, but not by personality. What was the point of having them there if none of us could recognize them? Why not just write an entirely new book with new character names to apply to these misfits? It didn't fit at all. And, yes, there is nothing wrong with having characters who are affected by the horrors of war. I was actually impressed at the beginning by how Collins developed that sense of hopelessness. However, these were no longer the characters we fell in love with, nor did they share the relationship dynamics of the first two books.
The pacing was also off completely. There was no real build-up, nothing was accomplished, and it just sort of sputtered off into nothingness at the end. I understand that this is supposedly "realistic", but at the same time it was just too dull and it dragged. Collins is a great action writer, there was no reason it should have had been that way. There are plenty of books that show the destitution and hopelessness of war without dragging, so you can't tell me that there are no other ways to present this other than what Collins gave us. Prim and Finnick died without a moment's thought or a chance to grieve, and we know this is not how Collins usually writes it, just based on how she presents Rue's death in the first book. And then to lead us on, for pages and pages filled with character deaths and confusing horrors (I can't be the only one who failed to understand the setup of the Capitals and the bizarre pods) only for Katniss to just pass out again with nothing accomplished. It was like, thanks Collins, for a completely pointless drag of action for no reason whatsoever. At least the first two books you gave us had action scenes that actually meant something to the overall plot structure.
So, just overall, it was rather sloppy. Poorly paced, poorly written, characters forgotten or abandoned, and nothing we loved about the first two books even encompassed within the third book at all.
1070 of 1316 found the following review helpful:
 Just think of Peeta's "hijacking" as a metaphor for what nihilistic anti-war propaganda does to 'Mockingjay'... Sep 01, 2010
By Suzanne G.
"Suzanne G."
First, I want to establish that I adored the first two books--I've read them multiple times and recommended them constantly at the bookstore where I work; I read them aloud to my husband, gave them to friends and relatives, and I've looked forward to Mockingjay's release for MONTHS! Once I got the book I didn't read it for several days--a little silly, but I realized I didn't want the story to end.
I should have kept to that instinct, because I have finished the book and now I just feel sick. I don't want to own it and I don't think I'll ever re-read it.
It wasn't even well-written! I don't say this off the cuff--it wouldn't be fair to criticize the book this way simply because I didn't like the ending--but it's true, and here's why:
**********SPOILER ALERT*********SPOILER ALERT***********SPOILER ALERT***********
It was predictable and contrived. Collins created lots of expendable characters (Hi there, Team 451!) and then spent most of the book killing them off. It reminded me of the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, where characters whose names you don't know are being killed left and right so you know this is SERIOUS without having to lose a major character--it's a cheap trick, and I expected better of Collins. And cheating like this doesn't actually work; it was so unlikely that she was going to kill off Katniss, Gale or Peeta in the middle of the book that it didn't really create the suspense she was going for. Prim's death (and Finnick's) could have been used much more thoughtfully; instead we had a blitzkrieg of constant attrition to remind us that THIS IS WAR. It wasn't evocative--it just made me feel numb.
This endless dying is interspersed with even-more-endless strategy and technical details. I repeatedly found myself skimming, which never happened with the previous two books. But these passages were so boring(!), and I kept hoping to find that Katniss had figured out a purpose or an orientation or had reached out to Peeta or even just accurately assessed something--but no luck.
Which brings me to character development, relationships, and philosophical reflections on values and motivations. They were vital in the previous two books, but they are nearly nonexistent here, and the book is fatally flawed because of it. Peeta is barely present, and if you discount the time that Katniss spends crying in corners, injured and in the hospital, taking morphling, or being manipulated or controlled by others and wandering around confused, she isn't really present either. And Gale is unfairly characterized in order to resolve the love triangle--it's baffling, because Katniss of all people isn't in a moral position to judge Gale, and I thought that was part of the point.
Ultimately, the story is hijacked--hey, that's a good metaphor!--by anti-war propaganda and a damn-near nihilistic outlook. I understand that Collins wanted to communicate that war and violence aren't glamorous. I think she's right. But (ironically) she's done real violence to her characters and the merit in the world she created in order to bludgeon us with that value.
In a way, you could call this book "more realistic". And yet--I think a book that accurately reflects the gritty horrors of war would show how people use dark humor as a coping mechanism. This book had none of the wry humor of the previous two.
And for pity's sake, what was Collins trying to achieve with the ending? I agree with those who say that Katniss agreed to a renewed Hunger Games featuring the children of Capitol citizens in order to get the opportunity to stop Coin--it's the only thing that makes sense, given what Collins is clearly trying to convey, and it fits best with the character of Katniss. But it's not made explicit in the text. Leaving this up to conjecture was a major error on Collins' part, or very bad editing. It's not wise to be subtle in the philosophical part of the book that is meant to put the heavy-handed part into some kind of context.
And the last four pages, where we finally learn: Peeta or Gale? An afterthought. I think what is worst is that by making this choice, Collins makes the war the only important part, the only real part of Katniss's life--all the rest calls for is a brief summary. Almost all injury, very little road to recovery (those "real or not real" conversations were one of the few highlights of the book). It's baffling to me that this tacked-on ending is still fairy-tale-esque (that is, Katniss did settle down with her True Love and have children). But why bother giving her this semblance of a fairy-tale ending when it's so clear that she's DEAD INSIDE? It could have been insightfully ironic--though that's a little sick--but it's not. It's just empty. Apparently, once you've been in a war, nothing--not even consummation of true love or the birth of your children--can bring you joy ever again.
I think the vital counterpart to accurately portraying the horror and corruption of war is the possibility of redemption, of pursuing redemption. And Collins set this up but didn't follow through. Both personally and politically, through all of 'Mockingjay' Katniss is reduced to this calculating, empty creature. Her reflections on putting those she loves before herself (as she does with Prim in the first book, and Peeta in the second)--her major arc as a dynamic character? Utterly gone here. She makes, what, TWO efforts to reach out to Peeta? Three? She realizes she should be doing better but makes barely any effort to do so. I suppose it could be argued that the war left her no time--though her repeated willingness to kill Peeta to save her own skin blights that rather--but afterwards? There's no mention of her interest in making it up to him. Even when she later has leisure as a wife and parent, post-war, to reflect on these things, she doesn't. Politically, too, she never finds a motivation--such as "a world where Peeta's child can be safe"--to sustain her. Her own survival (as Gale bitterly notes) seems to be her top priority--though hell, she's not even sure she wants that; she seems a lot more concerned that her death be a quick one. Great. Katniss is Everyman--a broken, broken Everyman. For pity's sake, I'm tired of the GROWNUP literature that shows us the depth to which the human spirit can sink--I don't need it here! The main perk of young adult literature is that you can have both good writing AND a hero who can inspire you by example to rise above and triumph. To my mind, the purpose of good YA lit is to explore dark topics in a meaningful, well-written way that doesn't leave you in a bog of existential misery. If this is the brave new world into which young adult literature is heading, let me say now that I want no part of it. I can re-read '1984' and 'The Road'--or pick up 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?'--anytime I want. In fact, the former are fine examples of how a book can be serious, gritty, and disturbing, and still satisfying. But if you're going to make someone sit through this near-nihilism, essentially conveying that neither individuals or humanity as a whole can never really change, they deserve capital-L Literature for their trouble.
I just wish I could go back and warn myself not to read this. I've never been interested in fanfiction but I think I'm almost willing to look some up, if only to get the taste of this out of my mouth.
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