Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

This is the third and final book in Suzanne Collin's Hunger Games series. The first was The Hunger Games, and the second was Catching Fire.


This book failed to blow my mind like The Hunger Games did. It was a solid conclusion to the trilogy, and took the reader to new, if largely expected, places. It wrapped up everything that needed wrapped up and was largely satisfying, but was not even close to as awesome as The Hunger Games was. Too bad.

Collins impressed me in this book with the horrible things she did to certain characters that seemed sacred and untouched before. Really bad stuff happens, people change, and characters really develop fully. Peeta especially has a really, really interesting development that sort of defines the book for me. And Buttercup. But I am a sucker for cats. I cried my brains out during one of Buttercup's scenes.

I felt like the Coin plotline was really contrived and/or confusing. You never really got a sense of what she was actually doing. Katniss didn't even seem to know what was going on with Coin ever, even at the end when Katniss acted rather decisively on some really questionable information about Coin. I felt like Collins really should have told us outright whether or not Coin had... done the things... but I was really unsure about that! It would have been nice to know whether the intrigue Katniss was acting on was real or imagined.

I would still recommend the series, but if you read the first book and don't feel like you need to know what happens next more power to you. The first book is orders of magnitude better than the rest of the series.