A review by marslotus
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

adventurous dark emotional sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

So it's taken me a good few days to think about what to say about this book, because I did like it I won't lie, but I've said before I feel that this is the weakest entry of the Hunger Games Trilogy and I just wanna talk about what issue bothers me the most (also apologies if this all sounds really negative, I'm better at wording my negative thoughts than my positive ones haha).

A lot of my problems with this book were often very small things that stacked on top of one another until it felt like a substantial pile of issues, but there was one problem I felt really stood out. A part of me feels like the knowledge of
Primrose's death
before it happened may have attributed to my feelings, but I was very disappointed in her lack of character. I knew
Coin and Prim would be dying by the end of Mockingjay, but when I was about 90% through the book I thought, "Would both deaths really be happening along with large, emotional ripple effects in the last few pages of this book? There's not pages for that and an ending, maybe they only happen in the movies?".
And yet it all happened and a part of me feels like I can't judge the pacing of it cause I was literally waiting for it to happen, but the last quarter of the book felt like it forced way too many things in such a short about of time. The realization I came to however, especially with Prim, was that I felt no emotions about either
death whatsoever.
It further made me realize how flat Prim was in comparison with the entire cast, she is a person with no faults and nothing negative to say to Katniss and I firmly believe that if Katniss was a male character we would be chastising the author for making a female character with so little dimension but are told she means the world to the protagonist.
When Prim died, I think a friend of mine put it best where it felt like it wasn't Primrose Everdeen who died, but Katniss's sister.
I understand she is quite literally meant to be the symbol of innocence in this series, but if I'm meant to feel something for her, I really need more than her existing just so we feel sad about Rue, or
so we feel sad for Katniss when she dies
because I feel like those are the only two things her character really accomplished. I'm especially saddened by this because Prim is Katniss's root throughout the entire series, (or at least was supposed to be, sometimes it felt like Katniss literally forgot about her sometimes when she would think about her life without Peeta) she is the main reason Katniss does the things she does.

Something I feel would greatly improve this issue is to just give Prim the slightest bit of conflict with Katniss, an easy way of doing this would be for Prim in Catching Fire to be mad at Katniss for volunteering for the games in her place. Even though Katniss came back alive, maybe there could be some sense of "How could you make me think you would die, I watched you every day hoping you'd make it," and she could feel conflicted about voicing that opinion cause she didn't even go through the games, so what right would she have to complain. All of this could be hanging over Katniss's head until the Quarter Quell is announced and maybe Prim realizes being mad about this isn't worth it, but it's too late and Katniss is gone. I don't know, I wanted Prim to be more that just some pure, healing angel or
a lamb sent for the slaughter.
She felt so nothing to me that I feel as though sometimes she could have only existed in Katniss's mind and not much would have changed.

Also I didn't like how Peeta was kind of just...
thrown into Katniss's ending. I never really felt like they really reconnected again and him being in District 12 felt a bit weird.
It makes me feel like for the past two books we were given something we were meant to look forward to as an audience, a meaningful relationship between Katniss and Peeta (not even necessarily a romantic one!), but everything in the end of the book was so rushed. I really wish a lot of the ending moments happened just a bit earlier in the book so we had time to think about it all. But I dunno, maybe this just wasn't my thing. I'm not the biggest fan of war stories and when like 10 characters were introduced to very obviously die so we'd feel bad about the horrors of war, I'm so upset to say I felt nothing. I know there was probably no where else for the series to go, but I kinda wish it wasn't a war book.
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