First, there were
The Hunger Games. Next everything was
Catching Fire as the districts of Panem began to rebel against the Capitol. Now in
Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic, 2010), it's all-our war.
Before writing novels, Suzanne Collins began her career as a TV writer for shows like Little Bear and Clarissa Explains It All before becoming the head writer of Clifford's Puppy Days. So the elements of a good story are there, certainly. Because it's a war, the stakes are simple, and everyone understands wars, so it becomes easier to write about that having to create, then immerse, your readers into the world of the story. So Mockingjay lacks a lot of the tediously-recited snippets of backstory in favor of just telling the story. Because it's a YA novel, and the primary readership target is teenage girls, Katniss STILL worries a lot about the whole Peeta-Gale thing, which is tiresome, but that element has been shoved pretty far into the background. Instead, the role and power of the media during wartime is emphasized, which is a really overlooked, but very interesting, aspect to focus on. I like that.
District 12 has been destroyed, but roughly eight hundred of their citizens were evacuated to District 13 to begin again. Katniss becomes the Mockingjay, a mascot for the rebels to promote unity throughout the districts, which eventually works. This is accomplished through propaganda short films broadcast through the nationwide TV network. Meanwhile the Capitol has been holding Peeta hostage until it was no longer necessary, using his well-known eloquence to try to halt the destruction. It doesn't work, and so they allow the rebels to recapture him. Reprogramming his mind from the Capitol brainwashing takes quite a while. Gale's hunting practice leads to him becoming one of the major rebel strategists; willing to go to extreme measures in order to win victories.
On a TV shoot/mission deep in the Capitol itself, Katniss pulls yet another of her audibles and directs her squad to President Snow's mansion to assassinate him. Things go very bad very quickly, as they tend to do in combat zones, and most of the members of her group are killed. Bombs disguised as presents explode in the middle of a group of children, and then a bunch of rebel medics rush in to help. (Prim is part of this group, on her way to becoming a doctor.) Then a second collection of bombs rain down, killing the medics and just about everyone else, causing enough mayhem that the Capitol is taken over by the rebels.
Katniss gets severely burned and goes into a deep depression over losing Prim, which makes sense, given how much she cared for her, and their mother's reaction to their father's death. President Snow has been jailed by rebel President Coin, awaiting execution by Katniss' hand since that was one of the terms for becoming the face of the rebellion. They run into each other, and Snow explains that if he could have, he would have simply escaped; that the bombing was planned by Coin. Katniss realizes that the strategy of using the medics as pawns was something Gale would plan, and that Coin is plotting to simply take over Snow's position, leaving much else about the government unchanged.
At the last second during Snow's public execution, she shoots Coin instead. Snow commits suicide, Katniss tries to, and the government is in chaos, eventually putting itself relatively back together. She is judged insane, and thus freely acquitted of Coin's murder, and she is relocated back to the rebuilding District 12 with Haymitch to keep an eye on her. But recovery takes a very long time. Eventually, things get better. She works with Peeta and Haymitch on writing a book to keep the memories alive of their friends who died in the war, and twenty years later she's married Peeta and they have two children, a son and daughter. Both still suffer from flashbacks, which the kids don't completely understand, but Katniss hopes that their generation will learn from the sacrifices hers made.
During times of war, the rules are different. And so sometimes there isn't a right answer, as Captain America: Civil War has just shown moviegoers. Those decisions can leave large wounds in those involved, which take a long time to heal. Sometimes they don't, completely. But life goes on. Friends and allies can disappear, for one reason or another. The ending of this series is decidedly mixed, which I like, because it's realistic. Lots of people hate the ending for that reason, but isn't that part of what fiction is supposed to do? Paint as true a picture as possible, so that the audience will learn something from it? The ideas behind this series were great. The setting is engaging, and the plot interesting. But because of her choice of POV, particularly in narrator, almost all of those wonderful background details are overshadowed. Which is frustrating. This is my favorite of the trilogy by far, though. The pacing plods along often, particularly after the massive Prim-killing explosion, but that allows us to feel the weight of this conflict and the choices made on both sides. There's a lot to chew on, unlike the earlier two.
#Wesley
