Mockingjay – (Third book in ‘The Hunger Game’ series by Suzanne Collins)

When I heard that the third installment of Suzanne Collin’s Hunger Games trilogy had hit the shelves, I ran to my local bookshop and grabbed a copy so fresh it was still on the shelving cart.

Then I spent the rest of the afternoon rejoining Our Heroine, Katniss, as she faced her final battle against the dreaded Capitol on behalf of the rebellious Districts. The battles in this book are not all super weapon shootouts against heavily armed soldiers; Katniss also faces manipulation by her “friends” among the rebels. Chief among these internal enemies is the Machiavellian and trustworthy Alma Coin, who has her eye on personally filling the power vacuum left behind once the rebellion is over. Her ruthlessly pragmatic approach to the war dogs Katniss all the way through her final adventure.

For those unfamiliar with Collins’ dystopian world of The Hunger Games, think Stephen King’s The Long Walk meets Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. Contestants are chosen from the various regions of the country and forced to fight to the death in a televised extravaganza complete with celebrity interviews, sponsorships, and theme costumes for each “tribute”.

In Mockingjay, we follow Katniss as she visits her now-destroyed home district and learns to accept (some) military discipline from the rebels in order to accomplish her final goal: kill the evil President Snow, even if means her own death. To accomplish this, she and her unit of rebel soldiers fight their way through the Capitol in a final push to seize the presidential palace. The city itself is rigged with booby traps, and is very much in keeping with the cruel inventiveness found in the earlier books. It may be a little over the top to imagine a city block rigged to dump the people walking its streets into a death pit, but given the technology explored in the earlier volumes of the Hunger Games, the city-as-deathtrap concept works.

Fortunately, while imagining a cruel future that combines the worst of our celebrity obsessions with the best in entertainment technology, Suzanne Collins avoids the trap of making Katniss a simple conqueror of evil. Even for a YA audience, the emotional turmoil of a young girl forced to both kill to protect the things she loves and to still face their ultimate loss allows Katniss to be a fully realized and multi-dimensional character who doesn’t get a Hollywood ending or a sympathetic martyrdom.

The only area that needed some fleshing out is the relationship between Katniss and her own feelings about things at the end, after
everything is “over”. There’s a sense that Katniss had a little bit more to say, even if only inside her own thoughts. For example,
one of the two contestants for her affections is swept aside, and she seems to accept it a very un-Katniss like way.

Ultimately however Mockingjay is a fitting end to a strong series. Bravo, Katniss!! Bravo, Ms. Collins!

Reviewed by Joshua Ramey-Rank:  www.writereadrant.wordpress.com