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MOCKINGJAY Book Description Series: The Hunger Games | Publication Date: August 24, 2010 Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she's made it out of the bloody arena alive, she's still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what's worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss's family, not her friends, not the people of District 12. Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final installment of Suzanne Collins's groundbreaking The Hunger Games trilogy promises to be one of the most talked about books of the year. Show More Show Less
Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Review Product Description Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she's made it out of the bloody arena alive, she's still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what's worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss's family, not her friends, not the people of District 12. Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final installment of Suzanne Collins's groundbreaking The Hunger Games trilogy promises to be one of the most talked about books of the year.
A Q&A with Suzanne Collins, Author of Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games)
Q: You have said from the start that The Hunger Games story was intended as a trilogy. Did it actually end the way you planned it from the beginning? A: Very much so. While I didn't know every detail, of course, the arc of the story from gladiator game, to revolution, to war, to the eventual outcome remained constant throughout the writing process. Q: We understand you worked on the initial screenplay for a film to be based on The Hunger
Games. What is the biggest difference between writing a novel and writing a screenplay? A: There were several significant differences. Time, for starters. When you're adapting a novel into a two-hour movie you can't take everything with you. The story has to be condensed to fit the new form. Then there's the question of how best to take a book told in the first person and present tense and transform it into a satisfying dramatic experience. In the novel, you never leave Katniss for a second and are privy to all of her thoughts so you need a way to dramatize her inner world and to make it possible for other characters to exist outside of her company. Finally, there's the challenge of how to present the violence while still maintaining a PG-13 rating so that your core audience can view it. A lot of things are acceptable on a page that wouldn't be on a screen. But how certain moments are depicted will ultimately be in the director's hands. Q: Are you able to consider future projects while working on The Hunger Games, or are you immersed in the world you are currently creating so fully that it is too difficult to think about new ideas? A: I have a few seeds of ideas floating around in my head but--given that much of my focus is still on The Hunger Games--it will probably be awhile before one fully emerges and I can begin to develop it. Q: The Hunger Games is an annual televised event in which one boy and one girl from each of the twelve districts is forced to participate in a fight-to-the-death on live TV. What do you think the appeal of reality television is--to both kids and adults? A: Well, they're often set up as games and, like sporting events, there's an interest in seeing who wins. The contestants are usually unknown, which makes them relatable. Sometimes they have very talented people performing. Then there's the voyeuristic thrillwatching people being humiliated, or brought to tears, or suffering physically--which I find very disturbing. There's also the potential for desensitizing the audience, so that when they see real tragedy playing out on, say, the news, it doesn't have the impact it should. Q: If you were forced to compete in the Hunger Games, what do you think your special skill would be? A: Hiding. I'd be scaling those trees like Katniss and Rue. Since I was trained in sword-fighting, I guess my best hope would be to get hold of a rapier if there was one available. But the truth is I'd probably get about a four in Training. Q: What do you hope readers will come away with when they read The Hunger Games trilogy? A: Questions about how elements of the books might be relevant in their own lives. And, if they're disturbing, what they might do about them. Q: What were some of your favorite novels when you were a teen? A: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine LEngle Lord of the Flies by William Golding Boris by Jaapter Haar Germinal by Emile Zola Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
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From School Library Journal Grade 7 Up Following her subversive second victory in the Games, this one composed of winners from past years, Katniss has been adopted by rebel factions as their symbol for freedom and becomes the rallying point for the districts in a desperate bid to take down the Capitol and remove President Snow from power. But being the Mockingjay comes with a price as Katniss must come to terms with how much of her own humanity and sanity she can willingly sacrifice for the cause, her friends, and her family. Collins is absolutely ruthless in her depictions of war in all its cruelty, violence, and loss, leaving readers, in turn, repulsed, shocked, grieving and, finally, hopeful for the characters they've grown to empathize with and love. Mockingjay is a fitting end of the series that began with The Hunger Games (2008) and Catching Fire (2009) and will have the same lasting resonance as William Golding's Lord of the Flies and Stephen King's The Stand. However, the book is not a stand-alone; readers do need to be familiar with the first two titles in order to appreciate the events and characters in this one. Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage Public Library, AK (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. See all Editorial Reviews --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------More About the Author Visit Amazon's Suzanne Collins Page Biography Suzanne Collins has had a successful and prolific career writing for children's television. She has worked on the staffs of several Nickelodeon shows, including the Emmy-nominated hit Clarissa Explains It All and The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo. Collins made her mark in children's literature with the New York Times bestselling five-book series for middle-grade readers The Underland Chronicles, which has received numerous accolades in both the United States and abroad. In the award-winning The Hunger Games trilogy, Collins continues to explore the effects of war and violence on those coming of age. Collins lives with her family in Connecticut. Show More Show Less
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Customer Reviews 2,070 Reviews 5 star: (865) 4 star: (356) 3 star: (337) 2 star: (266) 1 star: (246)
Average Customer Review 3.6 out of 5 stars (2,070 customer reviews)
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1,486 of 1,631 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Unexpected Direction, but Perfection, August 24, 2010 By A. R. Bovey - See all my reviews (REAL NAME) Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, Book 3) (Hardcover) This was a brilliant conclusion to the trilogy. I can only compare it to "Ender's Game" - and that is extremely high praise, indeed. When I first closed the book last night, I felt shattered, empty, and drained. And that was the point, I think. I'm glad I waited to review the book because I'm not sure what my review would have been. For the first two books, I think most of us readers have all been laboring under the assumption that Katniss Everdeen would eventually choose one of the two terrific men in her life: Gale, her childhood companion or Peeta, the one who accompanied her to the Hunger Games twice. She'd pick one of them and live happily ever after with him, surrounded by friends and family. Somehow, along the way, Katniss would get rid of the awful President Snow and stop the evil Hunger Games. How one teenage girl would do all that, we weren't too sure, but we all had faith and hope that she would. "Mockingjay" relentlessly strips aside those feelings of faith and hope - much as District 13 must have done to Katniss. Katniss realizes that she is just as much a pawn for District 13 as she ever was for the Colony and that evil can exist in places outside of the Colony. And that's when the reader realizes that this will be a very different journey. And that maybe the first two books were a setup for a very different ride. That, at its heart, this wasn't a story about
Katniss making her romantic decisions set against a backdrop of war. This is a story of war. And what it means to be a volunteer and yet still be a pawn. We have an entirely volunteer military now that is spread entirely too thin for the tasks we ask of it. The burden we place upon it is great. And at the end of the day, when the personal war is over for each of them, each is left alone to pick up the pieces as best he/she can. For some, like Peeta, it means hanging onto the back of a chair until the voices in his head stop and he's safe to be around again. Each copes in the best way he can. We ask - no, demand incredible things of our men and women in arms, and then relegate them to the sidelines afterwards because we don't want to be reminded of the things they did in battle. What do you do with people who are trained to kill when they come back home? And what if there's no real home to come back to - if, heaven forbid, the war is fought in your own home? We need our soldiers when we need them, but they make us uncomfortable when the fighting stops. All of that is bigger than a love story - than Peeta or Gale. And yet, Katniss' war does come to an end. And she does have to pick up the pieces of her life and figure out where to go at the end. So she does make a choice. But compared to the tragedy of everything that comes before it, it doesn't seem "enough". And I think that's the point. That once you've been to hell and lost so much, your life will never be the same. Katniss will never be the same. For a large part of this book, we see Katniss acting in a way that we can only see as being combat-stress or PTSD-related - running and hiding in closets. This isn't our Katniss, this isn't our warrior girl. But this is what makes it so much more realistic, I think. Some may see this as a failing in plot that Katniss is suddenly acting out of character. But as someone who has been around very strong soldiers returning home from deployments, this story, more than the other two, made Katniss come alive for me in a much more believable way. I realize many out there will hate the epilogue and find it trite. At first, I did too. But in retrospect, it really was perfect. Katniss gave her life already - back when she volunteered for Prim in "The Hunger Games". It's just that she actually physically kept living. The HBO miniseries, "Band of Brothers", has a quote that sums this up perfectly. When Captain Spiers says, "The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse. All war depends upon it." But how do you go from that, to living again in society? You really don't. So I'm not sure Katniss ever really did - live again. She just ... kept going. And there's not really much to celebrate in that. Seeing someone keep going, despite being asked - no, demanded - to do unconscionably horrifying things, and then being relegated to the fringes of society, and then to keep going - to pick up the pieces and keep on going, there is something fine and admirable and infinitely sad and pure and noble about that. But the fact is, it should never happen in the first place. And that was the point, I think. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | Permalink Comment Comments (182)
256 of 293 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars The detractors of this book wanted a fairytale, September 13, 2010 By DAVID OTOOLE (Chicago) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME) This review is from: Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, Book 3) (Hardcover) To start I am a 47 year old Veteran. I have read a lot of the bad reviews for this last book and I see a theme running through them all. They didn't get their fairytale ending and the people they liked didn't end up the way they wanted. Well If you are looking for a fairytale read Harry Potter. If you want a realistic book on how war really is and how people will sacrifice themselves to save their country, then this is for you. The love triangle between the three main characters resolves itself in the best way that I could see possible. The way each one would react to the horrors of war were obvious from book one. I don't want to include spoilers so Ill just say, read this with an expectation of a realistic portrayal of the characters and how the war would change them. The ending on a personal level, is not necessarily a happy one, but it is a realistic one. From a "Big Picture" perspective I think it was a happy ending. To expect that all of the main characters could live "Happily Ever After" after surviving what happened in all three books is unrealistic. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | Permalink Comment Comments (31)
156 of 189 people found the following review helpful: 2.0 out of 5 stars The good news is that Suzanne Collins is making a lot of money..., August 26, 2010 By A. Con - See all my reviewsThis review is from: Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, Book 3) (Hardcover) SPOILERS AHEAD You know it is a very bad sign when you are reading a particularly gruesome scene in which a major character dies and your first reaction is not grief or horror but to wonder how Lionsgate is going to include that in the movie without losing the PG-13 rating. And then to wonder if Lionsgate had any clue how dramatically Suzanne Collins was going to derail what had, up until Mockingjay, been a remarkably inventive and engrossing series. Mockingjay was one of my most anticipated reads of the year. So far, it has been the biggest disappointment. It's not a bad book, but it could have been so, so much more if Suzanne Collins had managed to trust the intelligence of her readers, and allowed us to draw our own conclusions about war and its cost. I think most people would have gotten the point without being bludgeoned by it in such a heavy-handed and unbalanced way. I wrote the following paragraph in response to another review, and it sums up one of my major issues with Mockingjay: "...Collins' intention was to show how compared to the realities of war, personal relationships don't matter. She sacrificed the major impact of her story to preach a self-evident message: War is Hell. No kidding. The true tragedy of war is its impact on real people, and real relationships, and unfortunately, there weren't any people who felt very real in Mockingjay. All the deaths would have
mattered a lot more to me as a reader if the characters had been multi-dimensional. ... I can think of several places in the book where just a few more words or paragraphs would have shed a lot of light on the characters and their motivations, and would have made the losses that much more poignant or horrifying." Characters who had been so vibrant and interesting in the first two books were one dimensional and inconsistent in Mockingjay. So flat and lifeless had they become that when they, inevitably, bit the dust, I hardly cared. What should have been the emotional climax, Prim's horrific death, didn't elicit anything more from me than a "Well, you could see that coming a mile away." And the impact of Katniss's breakdown following Prim's death was diluted by the amount of time Katniss had already spent hospitalized, drugged, or otherwise wallowing in misery. I am guessing that Collins wanted to show how helpless Katniss is, and how futile her efforts to take control of her life are. I'm guessing, because I don't really think she showed that in any way that elicited pity or compassion from me. It mostly all seemed like a huge muddled mess. And, even worse, it felt manipulative, and intellectually dishonest. I don't think there are many people who would contend that war is a good thing. There is no doubt that media can be intrusive, used to sway public opinion, and that reality shows can be grotesque. But those very same media that Collins attempts to skewer in the Hunger Games books are the media she is using to drum up publicity for her books. Ironic much? My very biggest problem with Mockingjay rests with the overall tone of the ending. I didn't want or expect hearts, flowers and rainbows, but if an author is going to include an epilogue that is at least 15 years after the events, I do expect to see some character growth, some movement towards healing, even if that healing can never be complete. I would even have settled for an indication that Katniss actually had some love for her children and for Peeta. If it is true that human history is filled with an unending cycle of wars, it is also true that human beings are remarkably resilient, and resilience had been one of Katniss's most notable characteristics. Instead, in the epilogue we are apparently left with a Katniss whose emotions are so deadened that she is incapable of joy in her children or in her husband. I can't fathom what Collins wanted me, as a reader, to feel at that point. Life is misery and then we die? War destroys everything and there's no hope? I have no idea. What I mostly felt was that I had just wasted 5 hours of my life that could have been spent reading better books.
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