A review by rara2018
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

5.0

I'll be the first to say it, but I think that if you dislike this as an ending to the series, you just don't get what the series was trying to do in the first place. I think this was my favorite book in the series—but there really is no such thing as a bad Hunger Games book (though I have yet to read the prequel, so I guess the jury is still out on that one)—and I genuinely think this ending was about as complete as we could possibly get from Katniss's story. This installation was truly about her and really let us see just how deeply this girl has been hurt from years and years of tragedy. From the first chapter with her visiting her home again in ruins to one of the final scenes with her final confrontation with Snow and Coin, we can see exactly how traumatized and she is and why her actions are the way they are. Katniss was truly just a moving piece of a puzzle much larger than her for most of the story, and the ways that this plays out as we see time and time again as she is consistently so much more than people take her for is so powerful. Also, after reading this, I find the internet's "Gale is a war criminal" idea to be even more of a reductionist take than I previously thought. People seem to forget he went through much of the same things as Katniss did, and that, to him, violence was the only solution (which isn't necessarily a good thing, but he was very Fleabag hot priest coded for a bit, and his character is objectively well written and complex). Peeta, along with the rest of the victors, were truly the most tragic figures of the story with them all being tortured and hurt by the capitol for years in so many different, yet equally insidious, ways. The ending with many of the tributes starting families and finally being able to make friends again was honestly the most beautiful, if tremendously bittersweet, part of the series. The biggest takeaways here, though, are ACAB and fuck the military-industrial complex.