Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

[lightreads]

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I think I can talk about this now. This book exists entirely in emotional textures for me. It’s like how a song can become so closely entwined with emotional response so you don’t know what is coming from the music and what is welling up from that breathless perfect moment you first heard it. This is always going to be the book I was reading when my girlfriend got her cancer diagnosis. I don’t have a lot of my usual tools here, is what I’m saying.



So, okay. Things I love.



I love the way this book talks about PTSD. Because no, it’s not like it politely waits until the war is over to come calling. Katniss broke on the wheel, but it was still turning.



I love how textured this universe is. Collins has the gift of sketching depth in just a few quick lines. There are several dozen people who could have narrated parts of this series: Finick, Annie, Haymitch, Johanna, Prim, her prep team, the list goes on. Katniss is embedded in a story that is far bigger and older than she is, and Collins does that perfectly. This is not a book about one girl coming out of nowhere to single-handedly save the world.



I love the way Collins has of distilling her thematic work down to little phrases that she replays and alters over the series. “Real or not real?” “Fire is catching.” “I am on fire.” It’s an obvious technique, and kind of plain, so perfect for these books.



I love how I complained a bit to myself at the end of Catching fire that I wished Peeta had an existence in something other than stock young adult lit boy devotion. And How Collins thought about that, too, and made me go, “no wait I’m sorry I’m sorry I take it back.”



I love how this series isn’t really about reality TV. I mean, it is, but it’s about the thing underneath. It’s about the narratives we make and consume, so packaged entertainment is only one piece of it. It’s not just a war of shooting flaming arrows, it’s a war of narratives. I love how Peeta’s story is all about that. Katniss films propaganda, but Peeta has to make sense of it all. He’s one hell of a soldier.







I love the ending. It’s all about narratives, again. I love the story they tell about Katniss during her offstage trial, that she was mentally unbalanced by everything and didn’t know what she was doing. Both completely wrong and completely true. I love how she wasn’t surprised by the story Snow fed her, not really. She already knew. I love Peeta, again, trying so hard to reconstruct the right narrative for his life. I love that was the weapon Snow chose.



I even love the silly teenage love triangle, because it’s a choice of narratives. Peeta, and all their baggage and the Games and their victory. Gale the soldier, the unflinching. I couldn’t help reading it as the choice between this complicated, difficult story, and a simple and dumbly satisfying young adult romp about setting the torch to blackly tyrannical enemies and riding off into the sunset.



Ah.





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Comments

[cahn]

So, okay. Because my best friend read this thing in an entirely different way than I did, I reread parts of it, and I am convinced the last quarter or so is absolute genius; I really like it quite a lot, much better than on first reading (I still don't like the first three quarters so much, mind you.)

Speaking of the entirely different reading: question for you. Do you think Katniss was seriously voting for another Hunger Games at the end? I couldn't even conceive that you could take her vote seriously, given the subsequent events; my friend was utterly convinced her vote was serious.

It makes a very large difference. If the vote was a feint, that whole part is brilliant. If it was serious, it's lame and sloppy writing. In my opinion, anyway.

It's just interesting to me that my friend and I (both of us reasonably literate people) could read it so differently, and not even admit the possibility of the alternate reading.

[lightreads]

I am convinced the last quarter or so is absolute genius;

Yeah, that's pretty much what I think.

And no, I didn't think her vote was for real. I mean, it couldn't be, really. And I think that's what the little bit of byplay with Haymitch was supposed to demonstrate -- she needed him to get what game she was playing and back her up.

[cahn]

Yes, yes! Exactly! Okay, good, because I was starting to wonder if I was going crazy.

I totally loved that bit with Haymitch -- and I also loved that, the weasel, he doesn't actually say what he's voting for, he says, "I'm with the Mockingjay." Which tells Katniss, really, everything she needs to know, without committing himself to anything he doesn't want to. Ha. I really think Collins does a remarkable job with Haymitch, not that I'm incredibly biased or anything :)

[livingbyfiction.livejournal.com]

Like you, I waited until all the books were out (I have learned my lesson after GRRM's fuckery!). And now I've just read them and it's love.

The last quarter of Mockingjay is indeed genius. First-person narrative was awfully restrictive in this book, though -- since Collins didn't plan for Katniss to be the Big Damn Hero, she might have loosened the POV.

But Peeta! Peeta! GUSH. He had me from the beginning as the abused little boy who quietly adores Mr. and Mrs. Everdeen's mythic romance, and Collins found a way to transform the love-starved fantasy into real, earned love for the real Katniss.

The epilogue makes me spitting mad, though. I'm writing a new one. Since I write fanfic approx once every 15 years and only when both highly invested and highly dissatisfied, draw your own conclusions.

[lightreads]

Yeah, the epilogue is pretty special pants. I can respect what she was trying to do there, having them disappear into political obscurity, but the whole thing was just weird.