Okay, Mockingjay now.
There will be spoilers in this post.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Seriously. Spoilers.
.
.
.
.
.
Stop here if you haven’t finished Mockingjay.
.
.
.
.
.
Okay, you’ve been warned.
.
.
.
.
.
The spoilers begin HERE!
The teen book group met on Sunday to talk about Mockingjay. We had a fascinating conversation that, at least for me, was mostly therapeutic. Every other sentence was a question: WHY was Katniss so crazy? WHY did Prim have to die (and why did it, and Finnick’s death, feel so anticlimactic)? WHY was the “real, not real” thing so sappy?
We talked about Katniss’ inability to admit that she was in love with Peeta and her PTSD. How can one person be expected to survive that much violence and catastrophe without some seriously psychological scars?
We talked about the way the violence in this last book was different from the violence in the first two. Without the arena, it felt more like war the way we know war, the way we see it on the news in real life. We talked a little bit about how the violence in the Hunger Games trilogy is different from the violence in something like Harry Potter because it is more like real-world violence. How does the type of violence here effect whether we pass these books on to our younger brothers and sisters?
We talked a little bit about the ways District 13 and its power-hungry President Coin were just another version of the Capitol and President Snow. I wish we’d had time to talk more about this and the uneasy peace at the end of the book.
As always, it was a great discussion. There are some other interesting blog posts and conversations going on all over the internet about this book. Here are some links:
- From author Gayle Forman’s blog.
- Some interesting thoughts from bookshelves of doom.
- Thoughts on a potential subtitle: “War is hell.”
- A discussion on Slate.
Also, DON’T FORGET! to come meet Suzanne Collins on Thursday, September 23, at 3:00pm. You need to purchase a copy of one of the books in the Hunger Games trilogy from P&P in order to get a signing line ticket. Do it. You don’t want to miss this.
