I should start by saying: It’s hard to write about the last of the Hunger Games books in a in a non-spoilery way, so if you haven’t read this book yet, you might want to stop reading now.
In Catching Fire, Katniss Everdeen unwittingly inspired revolution: now, in Mockingjay, the Districts are in full-out war with the Capitol, and Alma Coin, the President of District 13, is hoping Katniss will speak out in support of the rebel cause. Katniss isn’t so sure, because she’s not stupid: from very early in the book, she’s aware that the rebels may be using her just as much as the Capitol did:
What they want is for me to truly take on the role they designed for me. The symbol of the revolution. The Mockingjay. It isn’t enough, what I’ve done in the past, defying the Capitol in the Games, providing a rallying point. I must now become the actual leader, the face, the voice, the embodiment of the revolution. The person who the districts—most of which are now openly at war with the Capitol—can count on to blaze the path to victory. I won’t have to do it alone. They have a whole team of people to make me over, dress me, write my speeches, orchestrate my appearances—as if that doesn’t sound horribly familiar—and all I have to do is play my part. (10-11)
But, whatever doubts she has, the rebels seem the lesser evil: the Capitol has been cruelly oppressing the Districts for decades, and, as a more immediate concern, is holding Peeta, Katniss’s Hunger Games co-victor/sometime love interest, captive. So Katniss agrees to be the Mockingjay for the rebels, and the book proceeds with war and propaganda and violence and despair but also moments of hope and daring. The love triangle from the previous books keeps on playing out—Gale, Katniss’s best friend/other sometime love interest, is still around, training as a rebel soldier and helping to devise strategic attacks on the enemy. And things don’t get any easier when Peeta is rescued from the Capitol: he’s been tortured and brainwashed, and thinks Katniss is his enemy; she, meanwhile, blames herself for his condition.
Though a lot of this book is cringe-inducingly violent/sad—war, torture, more war, more torture—it manages to have some light-hearted and even funny bits, too. District 13, where much of the action is set, is highly regimented and militaristic and spartan— but there’s a section where it also starts feeling like a great big boarding-school, thanks to the schedule, the routine, the dining hall, the communal living. This is maybe especially true because Katniss is in school for part of the book, training to be a soldier along with another former Hunger Games victor, Johanna Mason: so we get paragraphs like this:
I sit on my bed, trying to stuff information from my Military Tactics books into my head while memories of my nights with Peeta on the train distract me. After about twenty minutes, Johanna comes in and throws herself across the foot of my bed. “You missed the best part. Delly lost her temper at Peeta over how he treated you. She got very squeaky. It was like someone was stabbing a mouse with a fork repeatedly. The whole dining hall was riveted.” (244)
Without saying too much about the story’s final scenes, I will say I was nervous for a bit that the ending was going to be irredeemably depressing, and pleased that it wasn’t. I like Katniss a lot in this book, how she’s self-interested and calculating and strategizing when she needs to be, and how this book makes clear how much of a loner she is/can be. And oh, the ending! Not the unnecessary epilogue, which I didn’t like at all, but what should have been the last words of the book, as far as I’m concerned:
So after, when he whispers, “You love me. Real or not real?”
I tell him, “Real (388)
Awwwww.
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