Hunger Games III

Just a quickie to say I finished Mockingjay, the final part of the Hunger Games trilogy this morning (yes a very busy week). You can read reviews of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire that we (I mean me and the girls) read back in March. After having a bit of a Twilight binge they were seeking some new reading and I read about this series, and we were hooked (much better written than Twilight they tell me.) We then had to wait till August for the final part, and I had to buy two copies because M was at her dad's house when it came out. It sat in my TBR pile much to M's annoyance as she wanted to discuss the plot and it's many failings with me as soon as she finished it. Since we moved my TBR pile is all wrong as most of them are now on the bookcase downstairs but I pulled Mockingjay out the other day and have alternated it with the more serious reading.

So our heros Katniss and Peeta survived the Games in the first two books and now have to survive a real war. There is a lot of politics, double-dealing, emotional manipulation, death and destruction. Set in a distant future on this world, partly back in the middle ages but with weird bits of futuristic technology, suspension of disbelief a definite prerequisite. They don't have a very nice society at the beginning and I'm not convinced the one they get after it's all over is going to be much better. Collins has a very negative view of human nature, although some of the characters have good strong qualities, loyalty and integrity, there is a great deal of shallow superficial self-serving behaviour, quite often from Katniss too. It did annoy me that she kept getting injured and going unconscious and missing bits and just waking up back at the hospital. She was a bit of a victim of circumstances in this book, much less of a driving force, she was not as clever and resourceful as she was in the other two, but maybe the author was trying to make some point about the emotional trauma suffered by the participants in the Hunger Games. And Gale, the other main character, just kind of drifted off at the end, which seemed all wrong for how important he had been throughout the story. Teenage pulp fiction really but an enjoyable read if you like that kind of dystopian fantasy writing.