Mockingjay

**There isn't actual PLOT spoilers, but maybe its a bit spoilery just because the books are so contrasty??** (I don't know)

***note***

I was going to do Catching Fire and Mockingjay together, but this ended up being about Mockingjay only. Catching Fire is a limbo book for me. It has small remnants of The Hunger Games, but those are slowly squashed out to make way for Mockingjay. So here's what I ended up with.

I can’t right an objective review of these books. This is my third time trying to write this review and I’ve about given up. I was too emotionally invested in this series and every time I sit and try and write a review all I seem to do is write about how pissed off I am. I felt like Suzanne Collins sat at her desk and thought “How can I take this really awesome female lead and completely destroy her”.  And thus Mockinjay was created. In war generally the bad shit falls randomly, but in Mockingjay everything was directed at Katniss. Everything was “how can I destroy Katniss; how can I strip her of everything she was; how can I take away everything that mattered to her”.

Maybe it’s the idealist in me, but Katniss was this amazing and fiery character in The Hunger Games and I expected more of THAT Katniss in the rest of the series.  Instead we are given an empty, broken shell of herself.  By the time I finished Mockingjay I was so numb, nothing really meant anything anymore. Mockingjay crossed a line for me, and there was no coming back from that. I broke. I was done. That was it. In the end everything Katniss worked for failed, her sole purpose throughout the whole series was destroyed in one line. ONE SENTENCE; that is how much worth was given to destroy everything she had worked for. Because of this I felt like the ending was just tacked on to placate me, “And they all lived happily ever after… with severe mental health issues”, like somehow that’s supposed to make it all better.

I leave you with a quote from this review on Goodreads that I thought best described my feelings about the book.

“I guess what depresses me most about this book is that I expected so much more from it. I know Collins is capable of power. In the end, I was too numb to feel its power, to even cry, to feel anything at all. I left a fantastic series with a major blank."

A.