Should i read mockingjay

I loved how the book played out. I the one thing I wish didn't happen was the ending. It seemed to end way to fast. And I, and most likely other Hunger Games fans, wish there was a 4th book.

The Hunger Games series was intended for young adult readers. It was suggested to me by a young friend and I was happily surprised that the series was not "just" for the young. The series, and "Mockingjay" in particular cover a number of ethical issues that we all can understand - loyalty to family, remaining true to core values and knowing the difference between freedom and safety.

I enjoy the books very much, although "Mockingjay" was much sadder in parts than I expected. This book was amazing but not at all what I thought it would be like. In the previous books we all know that a war is coming, and in Mockingjay it finally does happen. The war affects everyone drastically, sending many into death and to the point of almost going mad.

And as always, Katniss has to choose between Peeta or Gale. Don't worry, she does choose at the end of the book. That is what really moved me, because I have always wanted her to chose him, and the way Collins writes it at the end of the book it perfect. This book is very good and worth five stars for the way Collins has wrote it. It is very realistic and people do die that you have met throughout the trilogy. If Mockingjay was a movie, it would be rated PG, so know that there is a lot of violence throughout the book.

And with that said I wanted to read this book because my sisters all said that it was really good and also because I saw the first two movies of the Hunger Games series and I wanted to read the last story.

The book was very good and really kept you on your toes the whole time, every time I thought something was going to happen the opposite happened and I loved how it was so suspenseful. She was strong, resourceful, clever and cunning, she had an amazing survival instinct and she knew how to persevere. In Catching Fire, these qualities diminished; she was mainly a pawn, a puppet for others to use for their own objectives.

But she still had some semblance of control and she was still Katniss. In Mockingjay, all these traits are scrapped and we get a Katniss-clone who is angsty and bitchy and whiny wasn't Bella in Twilight bad enough? Half the book, she's throwing herself pity parties in the closet literally! Sure, she definitely has reason to be sad and angry, and her life is full of hardships and tragedies. But I thought that the Katniss from the Hunger Games, the Katniss who had to keep her family alive since the age of 12, would be able to fight through and persevere.

I guess I wanted a strong victor, a strong heroine, not a self-pitying victim who can't make her own decisions. She was a empty, lifeless pawn, a zombie if you will, who didn't do anything that wasn't directed or commanded by other people.

I was expecting to see her grow and change and I was excited for her metamorphosis. Instead, we get this weak girl who's shirking all responsibilities, addled on drugs half the time, and lashing out at people the other half. Not only did she not improve herself from the first book she was kickass in the first book btw , she got WORSE, an empty shadow of her former self.

At the beginning, I could understand her confusion, her pain, her reluctance to be the Mockingjay. It'd be weird if she DIDN'T feel this way, if she didn't have that time of indecision and unwillingness. But after, I expected her to be strong and work through it, to face her fears and obstacles and choose to do the right thing, to really fight for justice.

The best things in life never come easy; anybody who's done anything has had to overcome obstacles to accomplish their goals. When she decided: "I must be the Mockingjay", my heart soared cheesy but it did! When I heard her inspirational words during the propos, the fire behind them, my heart soared because I thought Katniss was back. But as I kept reading, I realized..

She didn't grow and become stronger, that's what pisses me off. The post-traumatic stress, the mental breakdowns, the self-pity, the self-loathing, the nearing of insanity..

There has to be a turning point when she overcomes all of this and actively decides not to let these obstacles stand in her way. Now, many people will say her breakdown is more true to life, and it's what any normal year-old girl would feel and go through. I want to read about someone who's a bit special, who's different, who displays traits like courage, heart, perseverance greater than the norm and accomplishes more than the "normal, average teen" even during the most difficult of times.

Something that, when you close the book, makes you feel like "Wow, they're amazing. I want to be like that. I came in expecting a break from reality, a fantasy sci-fi young adult novel about a girl who becomes a hero. In trying to be as realistic as possible, I think Collins chose a pessimistic extreme of "realism" to portray.

There are perfectly human people in real life in real circumstances who are able to fight through obstacles and hardships and come out on top without relying on drugs and hiding in closets.

They can find more constructive and positive ways to deal with their problems. Sure, it obviously affects them they're not invincible but they don't lose themselves the way Katniss does. Those are the kinds of inspirational stories I wanna read when it comes to these kinds of novels, not this "Diary of an Emo Puppet.

Whenever Collins finally gave us an exciting scene, as soon as it got intense, Katniss would get knocked out in the midst of things and we'd wake up to her in the hospital being treated.

Then, of course, comes the inevitable centuries that's what it felt like of us hearing about her in pain and agony. Now can she please pick herself up and make herself useful? Katniss doesn't deserve the title "girl who was on fire" and to be the main character in such an epic setting and story.

Sure, she can be on fire, but only when someone sets her on fire or directs her to be on fire, not of her own doing. She was soulless and indifferent and cared about herself and her own feelings more than anyone else's seeing as how she spends most of the novel grieving for herself and almost never for anyone else..

What's the point when the main character whose eyes we're seeing through has no heart and no passion? And what happened to the selfless girl who willingly sacrificed her life to save her sister? The things I did like. I liked that Katniss had 2 seconds of mental clarity and shot Coin instead of Snow the only time in the book when she was truly thinking clearly and acting of her own accord. I wonder if I'm giving her too much credit though; judging from her selfish one-track mind in this book, I fear that she did this only because Coin killed Prim, not because she saw the bigger picture.

Worse yet, I fear this may just have been a result of Snow's manipulation, not her own decision. I also feel the significance and bravery of this smart moment was rendered meaningless by her immediate cowardly reaction: instead of having conviction in her action and facing the consequences, she scrambled frantically to find the most painless and quickest way to kill herself.

She never once in the book acknowledges all she has to live for and all the positive things she still has in her life. When a character's will to survive is absent through a whole novel, I as a reader have no desire for them to live either; grant their wish already! But to continue on.. I liked learning about more of the characters in depth: Gale who I grew to love even more in this book , Finnick, Annie, Boggs, Johanna, etc. I liked the ending passages fitting and beautifully haunting and I liked the songs The Hanging Tree and the meadow one.

There are probably some other things that I'll update this review with once disappointment and frustration are no longer clouding my brain.

I wouldn't have minded so much if it had been a page-turner that was exciting to read, but trying to finish this book felt like a chore. When reading for enjoyment starts feeling like a chore, that's the ultimate sign that I dislike the book. I kept waiting, I was so sure it would happen any minute, for the story-changing moment when Katniss would pick herself up and say "Enough is enough. This book seriously dragged and dragged and dragged, and just got slower and slower until everyone started dropping dead towards the last quarter of the book.

The Hunger Games, I couldn't put it down; for this, I dreaded picking it up to finish it. I did tons of things in between reading this book doing my nails, watching TV, taking a walk, etc because I couldn't read it in one sitting without wanting to gouge my eyes out.

It was the same reoccurring theme: Katniss was manipulated and controlled by everyone around her and she didn't think or do anything of her own will. It got old. I read all this build-up and didn't get rewarded for it. And even though the rebels triumphed, I didn't feel anything for them, not relief, not happiness, just nothing. I was just detached. And none of it was thanks to Katniss: her only role in the Capitol's defeat was watching Prim die, getting burned, and waking up in a hospital, where we're TOLD instead of SHOWN how the Capitol fell all while she was unconscious, an occurrence that's way too common in this book.

Again, anti-climactic! During the scene when it really mattered! I understand the message Collins is trying to convey and I agree with it: that war is awful and no one truly wins.

And good and bad are not clearly defined black and white. It got too preachy at certain points though, didn't it? And I understand that not all books are unicorns-and-ponies happy endings, and that this series has always been intense and dark and a bit bleak. But that only works when there's an underlying message of hope and of optimism. I felt it in the 1st books, but this ending was devoid of all hope and happiness.

Yes, humans are disgusting creatures who hurt and kill one another, who do horrible things because of greed and selfishness and just pure malice. But humans are also capable of love and compassion and kindness, and I wish she'd incorporated a bit of that into the story as well so there'd be a more hopeful ending.

Even in real life, no matter how bad things may be, there is always hope. Isn't that the kind of message you really want young people to be left with?

Instead of pessimistic doom and "give up on mankind"? I finished the book feeling hopeless and lost and depressed, and not in that deep, profound way where it motivates me to get up off my ass and do something to make a difference. Gosh, at least Harry was his own person and got to face Voldemort in the end.

What did Katniss get to do except be an empty canvas for them to paint and feed lines to? Though I guess since I'm feeling so passionately about all of this, it wasn't a worthless read. It was just very, VERY disappointing. Edit: I just re-read this review a month or so after I wrote it and I sincerely apologize for my sloppy writing and overindulgence in run-on sentences!

I was in a rush to unleash all my feelings after finishing the book so I wouldn't forget anything. I hope this review was understandable and enjoyable anyway : That's the end of the review and you can stop here but I wanted to add on.. Sometimes you've got to think about the greater good! This is war! Don't think I don't know how this might end. I've known it for years. Whatever faults the last HP book may have, I just have to say: Thank you, Harry, for giving me hope again and proving there are still admirable heroes in young literature.

View all comments. Author of Youth I agree! Dec 03, Tatiana rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: anyone who prefers to think instead of obsessing over love triangles.

Shelves: dystopias-post-apocalyptic , , favorites , ya , , , , I keep switching the rating of this book from 5 to 4 to 5 again, changing my opinion with each reread. On the one hand, it has so many wise things to say about war, propaganda, grief, trauma and healing. It touches and breaks my heart every time, like very few books do. But, on the other hand, there is a large chunk of this novel in part 3 mainly , that objectively makes almost no logical sense.

I wish Collins took more time to work it to perfection, like she did with the first two. Going back t I keep switching the rating of this book from 5 to 4 to 5 again, changing my opinion with each reread.

Going back to 5 again. For that epilogue. And cat. This reread just makes me even more skeptical about what a story about Snow has to offer, in comparison to this one.

So, of course I had to read it again after getting only half of the story from the Mockingjay movie. Unsurprisingly, cried and cried again. My feelings basically remain the same about this installment. Structurally, the novel is quite messy. There is such a big game going on and Katniss' motivations and actions don't always make sense to me.

But the ending is brilliant, especially the final chapters. I need something to cheer me up ASAP. Is a kitchen towel drenched in my tears a good indicator of the quality of Mockingjay? I think it is, considering that I am not a crying-over-books type. The book is lying next to me now, so deceitful in appearance, with its innocent, bright, cheerful cover.

Who knew there would be so much darkness hidden between its pages, so much heartache? Mockingjay is indeed a DARK, DARK book full of deaths, sacrifices, torture, betrayal and despair, a book which takes you to a very disturbing but very real place.

These books are about love indeed, but they are also about survival, freedom, and peace. I find it amazing that people are disappointed that Katniss doesn't take a Katniss-becomes-a-superwoman-and-takes-over-the-world-while-deciding-on-which-boy-to-pick route.

How realistic is it to expect a child damaged by hunger, oppression, and violence she had to witness and take a part in, and thrown into the midst of all kinds of political intrigue, to achieve that?

How many soldiers do you know who came out of a war unscathed or empowered by the atrocities they have witnessed? How many children? This is why this book has such a great effect on me. It takes a very difficult but honest route, portraying the infinitely damaging consequences of war regardless of the righteousness of its cause and Katniss's journey to stay true to herself and do the best she can.

And the love triangle resolution. Truly, it couldn't have ended any other way. Is Mockingjay a perfectly written book? Absolutely not, it's not nearly as perfectly constructed or clear as The Hunger Games , but just like another imperfectly perfect successful series finale - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - it brings its message across in the most honest and powerful way possible.

Suzanne Collins is a genius, she is fearless and I have a great respect for the gutsiness of hers that didn't allow her to settle for an ending all wrapped up in pink paper with a perfect little bow. I am sure she knew that the faint of heart would be enraged. But she stuck to her guns and stayed true to her message and to her characters.

It will probably take me months and a score of Georgia Nicolson diaries to get over it. But I love this book anyway, in spite and because of all the pain it has caused me. Jan 28, Hope rated it it was amazing Shelves: thought-provoking , cover-love , heroes-i-love , heroines-i-love , best-characters , dystopian-utopian , young-adult , reviewed , best-couples , to-reread-someday. It's good, and yet not good. Katniss is a different person from the first two books. I found her softer, more thoughtful, and also more open granted, she's still kind of a brat sometimes.

But don't we all have our moments? This book is filled with more emotion, and I liked her best in this book, even though it's a tragedy of sorts. Something so painful. It was a fantastic novel. I don't think I can come up with any better way for a trilogy of this kind to come to a close. The perfect note of sadness and sweetness, pain and healing all mixed up in a jumble. This book was far more severe than the first two. Much harder to read, and with more emotional depth, I think.

Sometimes I just had to close the book for a while and breathe because I needed to stop for a bit, to regroup myself so I could get through a certain part. Collins wove in a few questions to ponder. Where do you draw the line? Do you give just what you got? Is it right to kill innocent people just because the leaders on their side of the line killed innocent people on your side? Contrary to what some believe, this is not an anti-war book.

Actually, I think Collins is trying to get us to ask ourselves questions about what justifies war, and where the line should be drawn between justice and vengeance. Not that we shouldn't fight, but that we know what's worth fighting for.

Several notable characters die. The last three pages make all the heavy, intense, painfulness of the rest of the book almost worth it, in a strange way.

Bittersweet is the perfect word. Sometimes we need a little help to pick ourselves off the floor and start again. It left me feeling emotionally drained and like I'd lost something. I'm not sure if I'm shell-shocked or simply worn out by the intensity of it all. I'm glad, in a way, that it ended like it did. I'm also sad, and a little confused. Not because I didn't like the ending, but because I simply feel emptied out for the time being.

I just wish I wish that there could have been more happiness for these characters that I love so much. I think that unfulfilled wish is, at the end of the day, why I'm feeling this way right now. In time the feeling will pass, I know, but at the moment I'm sorry for it. No matter how I enjoyed this book and I did, I really did , I'm in a sort of grieving state.

Happiness was there in the end, but it just wasn't enough to compensate for all the sadness. Then again, I think that was the point. I finished Catching Fire and wanted this in my hands immediately. Not like uber-happy, of course, I'm not unrealistic I don't care! I'm not making any predictions because it feels like either my wishful thinking or my most dreaded outcome.

I can't find a balance in between. Call me weird. All I can say without bias is that the ending will not be all walkin' in a field of flowers and happiness. Nov 25, Khanh, first of her name, mother of bunnies rated it it was ok. Ok, short summary. This is day 3 of my Hunger Games binge after I watched the last movie last Saturday without knowing anything about the books and not having watched any of the movies.

First book. Second book. Third book. And now that we've gotten that over with What the fuck happened to Katniss?! How did she end up being so admirable and awesome in the first two books and turned into such a sniveling, squishy mess in this one?

The answer: Peeta. What the fuck happened to Peeta? Ok, fine, we know what happened to Peeta, but that doesn't make it any better because he's collateral damage.

And Katniss is the one who gets hurt with her stupid obsession of him. In this book, Gale was my favorite. He's the voice of reason. It's war, people have to die in order for there to be peace. Because I love d? Fuck your single-mindedness, Katniss. And that ending. That stupid ending. I'm sorry, I know that life doesn't always turn out well, but dammit, Suzanne Collins, you put us through the wringer with the last two books.

May 24, Kat rated it really liked it. View all 30 comments. Feb 09, Jayson rated it liked it Shelves: genre-science-fiction , genre-dystopian , author-american , pp , genre-young-adult , read-in , subject-war. View all 61 comments. View all 71 comments. Feb 11, Annalisa rated it liked it Shelves: sci-fi , dystopia , cover , young-adult , cried. I'm not sure how to react to Mockingjay. I didn't love it and I'm not sure it satisfied me, but it was a disturbing read that will stick with me.

Not that the series isn't good, but I'm not longer sure it's for the masses of YA readers. Like Catching Fire , Mockingjay took awhile for me to get into. When the pages turned into the triple digits and I wasn't hooked, I go 3. When the pages turned into the triple digits and I wasn't hooked, I got worried it wouldn't be epic. Like Catching Fire , the stakes are upped, the gruesomeness of war more real, and the intensity more fierce. And in the end, that was my biggest problem.

In my opinion, this crossed the line with violence into shock value for the sake of shock value. Yes, it's meant to be thought-provoking and show the price of war to humanity, but at the peak of all this violence, I pulled out of the story. I could see the questions running through her head: "What is the worst thing I could do to Katniss?

What will break her the most? The death that should have hurt most hardly fazed me view spoiler [Primrose hide spoiler ] ; at that point, I had already shut down in a story that was working too hard to manipulate my emotions. It was view spoiler [Finnick's death hide spoiler ] killed me no pun intended , and it disappeared like a whisper.

It seemed like Collins picked the only character she made us care about in this book on purpose. It should have felt natural to the progression of the story, but it didn't.

There is a lot of bleakness in the other books in the series, but it is balanced with a humanity and hope that I think is crucial in YA fiction. My review of Hunger Games states that Collins took an unbelievable story and made it believable. Here, she took the believable violence and cruelty of war and made it a little unbelievable for me. I struggled to find motivation from President Snow targeting children, to understand why the citizens of the capital continued to believe him, to accept that these villains could be this sadistically evil, to believe that this much could go wrong for one person, to champion Collin's bleak take on humanity.

Not that this story is any more unbelievable than The Hunger Games , but Collins delivered this one with such a numb, detached string of events that relied on violence instead of characters to deliver her message. Even more important than hope in YA is a strong character you would follow anywhere. I didn't want to follow Katniss in this story. She shut down in the end, but really she'd been shutting down the entire book.

After the fiery character of the first two books, it was hard to get nothing from her especially as a first-person POV and still feel vested in the outcome of her story. Her cold, detached comments to view spoiler [Peeta hide spoiler ] in particular bothered me, especially after everything he sacrificed for her. I had to keep reminding myself of all the horror she'd been through because although her detachment realistic, it bothered me. I couldn't remember why anyone wanted a self-absorbed teenager as the Mockingjay.

Without any character development from any of the characters , the story relied too heavily on action without connecting the pieces, developing those story lines, or making me care about the characters involved.

I would have almost rather heard the story from a third party watching a broken Mockingjay than the emptiness with which Katniss tells her story. What I really wanted is Katniss back.

I know I can't have her, but if I had to lose her, I wanted to feel heartbreak instead of nothing. About the love triangle But I was happy with the resolution for these reasons: 1. Gale never showed up in this book, not the intense Gale hiding a painful love for Katniss that I loved. Not once in this book did I feel his love for her. Was comfortable with her, coldly understanding, wanted to win her because it was a competition, but never once did I sense any love.

And when he knew the enormous hurdle he had to overcome to win her back, he laughed and walked away. I would not have minded if the Gale who showed up for this story had been one of its casualties. It was pretty clear from the first chapter that Collins was directing us away from this relationship she had dangled in front of us. If this is the way the relationship had always been, as this book seems to imply, than this is the relationship that should have been there in Catching Fire.

For the first time in the trilogy, Peeta was not a Gary Stu, a doormat, a little too sacrificial for me to believe. He bite back. Unlike during the games, I never doubted that he could survive on his own.

He stopped wanting to be a pointless martyr the death pleas were still there, but this time they made sense. Not that I ever wanted Peeta to be mean or broken, but he can have heart and a backbone too.

He could have a few flaws. Finally, I could root for him. My last reason is not that as Gale and Peeta changed, Katniss did too, and so did the world they lived in. I'm going to keep this review almost spoiler-free — there will be minor league spoilers, but nothing too heavy duty, and no major plot twists. Please try to do the same in the comments — if you need to post a spoilery comment, the Mockingjay spoiler thread is here.

So to start off with, I'll just give the verdict first: Mockingjay starts off badly, with a rocky first few chapters full of clunky exposition. And then it quickly gathers steam and becomes a thing of incredible beauty and power, until it reaches an ending that you'll be thinking about for days, or maybe years, afterwards. And for those of you who've been waiting until the third volume came out to decide whether to read the Hunger Games books, it's now officially a good idea to do so.

This trilogy is going to be up there with Ender's Game and a select handful of other books as a powerful examination of coming of age and wartime. So I wasn't entirely sure how Mockingjay was going to play out — the second book in the series, Catching Fire , tried to copy the formula of the first book a bit too much for my liking, but it featured an ending that shifted the status quo so radically that the third book would have to be something totally different.

But Collins manages to bring back all of the same themes and ideas from the first two books, only in a radically new context that makes them even deeper and more heart-breaking. In case you know nothing about the series, the Hunger Games series takes place in the future. The shattered remains of the United States, now called Panem, are separated into 12 different districts under the rule of a tyrranical Capitol.

And as punishment for a past rebellion against the Capitol, every year the districts send two young people, "tributes," to take part in games of survival in a huge artificial arena, and the whole thing is televised. The "tributes" have to put on a good performance on television, or they won't win as much support from viewers — and support can mean supplies that could save their lives.

So Katniss becomes not only a popular hero, but a kind of celebrity, and potentially a symbol of resistance against the Capitol. It's a weird setup, to be sure — a post-apocalyptic future in which so much that we take for granted is gone, but reality television remains. Collins had a plan from the very beginning of how the trilogy would play out, and she never veered from it.

According to Levithan, though, she didn't reveal that plan to him or any of his colleagues in advance. While details may have changed and some characters got a little more page time once they started talking, the overall arc of it was always what she had planned. As with The Hunger Games and Catching Fire , reading the first draft of Mockingjay had Levithan and his colleagues all feeling like fans.

I mean, that gutted us. It brought home again what I was saying about Rue in the first book, but to an exponential degree: the futility of war and how there aren't happy endings after a war. There are always sacrifices, and the things you've tried to save the most are often the things that you lose.

He laughs as he admits, "I should have intellectually thought that she might go there. But it wasn't until I read it that it hit me, that's where it went.

That was one of the first questions I asked her when we sat down: 'Did you always know that [Prim] was going to die? Even in the past few months of , life as we know it has completely shifted. But Levithan says that if Collins wrote the conclusion to the trilogy today, it would be exactly the same as it was back in You can find the common themes of everything of every war that happened between those, every war that has happened since or is going on in the world now.