I liked The Hunger Games, but I wasn’t sure how much I was going to like Catching Fire. The early pages felt clunky; I couldn’t find or get into the rhythm of the narration. But then the plot got going and I didn’t care about the quality of the prose at all, I just cared about Katniss and her story.
The book starts just before the Victory Tour, an annual trip that winner—or, in this case, winners—of the most recent Hunger Games must make, visiting all the other Districts. Katniss is dreading it: competing in the Games was bad enough, and now the Victory Tour will remind her of the experience and put her in the public eye again. The Tour also means having to play the part of being madly in love with Peeta, the other winner of the Games: it was Peeta’s real devotion to Katniss, and her partly real but partly feigned devotion to him that let them both survive the Games. As if that’s not bad enough, Katniss gets a surprise visit from the President, who warns her that she’d better not use the tour as an opportunity to stir up any trouble: some of audience saw Katniss’s behavior at the end of the Games as an act of rebellion, and President Snow fears that any act of defiance will ignite more and larger ones.
So Katniss sets off on the Tour, determined to act her best and manage to get home afterward and have some peace, but that doesn’t exactly work. But oh, I did like watching Katniss and Peeta together in scenes like this, from the first morning: “He catches me and spins me around and then he slips—he still isn’t entirely in command of his artificial leg—and we fall into the snow, me on top of him, and that’s where we have our first kiss in months. It’s full of fur and snowflakes and lipstick, but underneath all that, I can feel the steadiness that Peeta brings to everything” (42).
The Capitol is clearly getting nervous, and responds to every hint of rebellion or disunity with swift and brutal retaliation. And to make things worse, the next Hunger Games will be a Quarter Quell: every twenty-five years there’s some extra-special awful twist to the Games, as a way for the Capitol to remind the Districts just how powerless they are—just in case the basic premise of each District having to send two teenagers into an arena to fight to the death on television wasn’t quite doing the job.
Meanwhile, Katniss has other things to think about, too: tension with/distance from her best friend, Gale, and tension with/distance from Peeta, and also whether there really might be a rebellion against the Capitol, and the question of what is in District 13. (Like everyone else, Katniss learned in school that it was obliterated as a lesson to the other Districts after the attempt at rebellion, decades ago, but what if it wasn’t?)
I liked this book for Katniss’s initial indecision and later anger and resolve; I liked the story and the pacing, and how I saw some of the twists coming, but others not so much: it was just the kind of balance/tension that makes a book like this unputdownable for me. And oh! I either have really good luck or there’s a hold-shelf fairy at the library: I’d put holds on this book and the next one at the same time, and then crossed my fingers and hoped that this book would get in first. As it turned out, it was even better: both books arrived at the same time, so I could go straight from this one into the next, which was precisely what I wanted.
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