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Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games) |  | Author: Suzanne Collins
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Category: Book
List Price: $17.99
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as of 9/8/2010 13:30 MDT details
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Seller: Tabs Books and Music
Rating:  488 reviews
Sales Rank: 5
Media: Hardcover
Reading Level: Young Adult
Pages: 400
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.4
ISBN: 0439023513
EAN: 9780439023511
ASIN: 0439023513
Publication Date: August 24, 2010 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product 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.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 488
 Unexpected Direction, but Perfection August 24, 2010
A. R. Bovey
422 out of 469 found this review helpful
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.
Yes, I read all night... August 24, 2010
Susan Tunis (San Francisco, CA)
65 out of 82 found this review helpful
If The Hunger Games and Catching Fire are tales of a dystopia, then Mockingjay is a slight departure for the series. This final chapter in the trilogy is a war story. Panem is at war. The stakes for Katniss and the band of characters that we've grown to love (and sometimes hate) have never been higher. And while Suzanne Collins' work on this series has been masterful to date, she rises to the occasion to give her story the conclusion it deserves.
As the novel opens, Katniss and hundreds of other refugees and revolutionaries have been taken in by the citizens of District 13. The rumors were true, but District 13 is both more and less than anything she could have envisioned. While safety is a fluid concept in Katniss's experience, she is what passes for safe at the moment. Still, she is tortured by thoughts of Peeta, being held prisoner in the Capitol. And she is tortured by too many ghosts. We're introduced to a somewhat more fragile Katniss in this novel, and she is not the only character in a somewhat diminished state. The events unfolding around them, as well as those of the past few years, have taken a heavy toll.
It is in this final chapter that the surviving characters must wage a battle for the future of Panem. Ms. Collins has never shied away from depicting graphic violence and disturbing scenes, and this novel may be the most disturbing yet. For me, the life and death struggles that occur in a war resonate more painfully than a staged fight to the death. There's no denying that this is a dark tale. It is even more impressive, therefore, that Ms. Collins manages to infuse enough humor into the book to occasionally relieve the gloom, and to remind us why we love these characters in the first place.
This third book is a departure in other ways. The pace of the story-telling wasn't quite as breathless. While still very much a thriller, in some ways Mockingjay allowed itself a bit more time to explore the emotional lives and constantly shifting relationships of the characters, as well as the full ramifications of the dangerous situations in which they found themselves. The emotional aspects of Katniss's tale have never been given short shrift, but there was a greater expansiveness here, perhaps owing to her increasing maturity. Of course, fans are waiting with bated breath to learn the outcome of the Katniss-Gale-Peeta love triangle. There is a resolution, one that seemed like the only possible outcome to me. The ending of the book is satisfying, not always happy, but deeply satisfying.
Perhaps the best testament I can give Mockingjay is to tell you that this 41-year-old, responsible, gainfully-employed woman read it from cover to cover between 1:00AM and 7:00AM this morning. Not for one minute was I in danger of falling asleep. I think it's going to be a long time before a story inspires me to want to pull a stunt like that again.
A powerful, unflinching look at the effects of war August 30, 2010
Joshua Mauthe (Nashville, TN)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
I've thoroughly enjoyed the unflinching, brutal first two books of the Hunger Games series, but even so, I don't think I was quite prepared for how good Mockingjay is, both as a conclusion to the series and a brilliant stand-alone work. Whereas The Hunger Games and Catching Fire touch on themes such as the effects of violence and conflict on the participants, Mockingjay goes a step further, making the explicit connection that's been there all along and making the theme crystal clear: this is a series about the horrors of war, and what it does to all of us, participant and bystander, foe and friend. Mockingjay isn't an easy book, and those expecting even the tense violence of the first two novels may not be prepared for the brutality and cruelty on display here. Indeed, many fans of the series are rebelling against the final book, resenting its pessimism and bleak worldview. It's not a feeling I sympathize with. What drew me to The Hunger Games in the first place was its honestly and unflinching nature, and Mockingjay is a logical conclusion to that process, as the long-brewing rebellion erupts into full civil war and lines are drawn. There's so much here that I loved - the eschewing of the "chosen one" syndrome among books like these, the refusal to pull punches, the time spent on scar tissue both physical and emotional, the questioning of motives - that I wish I had more people who had read it just so I could have a big roundtable discussion about it. Suffice to say, with Mockingjay, The Hunger Games trilogy becomes one of the best YA series I've had the pleasure to read, and one whose impact can't easily be shrugged away or forgotten. It's not an easy read, but it's an honest one, and that, to me, is what makes it so brilliant.
Ease out August 27, 2010
Justine Nough
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Reread the last paragraph, then the epilogue. Then reread it again. Then again and again. You'll feel better.
the fall of Rome August 31, 2010
Mary L Wagner (Fayetteville, NC United States)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I'm still shattered from this trilogy, and dealing with its emotional impact by finding literary and historical parallels. One of the most obvious parallels is the Roman Empire, eventually brought low by the ramifications of its own decadence (President Snow is quite the Caligula; the Hunger Games themselves are straight-up gladiatorial contests, with Finnick's trident as an obvious allusion; and there are even the emetics at the banquet from one of the earlier books). The Capital depends on the provinces for everything, including its military, which was part of the reason for the fall of Rome as well.
I found the different reactions of each character - Kitniss, Peeta, Gale, Prim, Finnick - all very realistic. Some will break, some of those can be fixed, some will go hard and unbreakable, some will find their path, some will just be sacrificed and yes it's totally unfair.
What happened to the Romans when the Vandals came through the gates? And what happened in Germany, and in Britain, and in Ireland, and in North Africa? History, like Collins' epilogue, shows that while civilization goes dark, life and light can still go on.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 488
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