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Whereas I would give The Hunger Games and Catching Fire 5 stars, I give Mockingjay 3 stars for average. It's not bad, but it's poor compared to its predecessors.

Catching Fire ended with a cliffhanger ending where I waiting for an entire year on the edge of my seat only to be extremely frustrated when I turned the last page of the highly anticipated Mockingjay. Mockingjay was disappointing at best.

I have a few qualms about the book: mainly that it seemed chaotic and hurried and secondly that many of the characters, especially Katniss, seemed to step out of character a lot.

I think Collins� publisher may have rushed Collins into finishing the book before the August 24th deadline which made for a very rushed ending. Either that or Collins got excited about another book she is going to write and wanted to finish this series as fast as possible to start her next one. The ending is a flop!

I would have rather waited another month or two than be presented with this conclusion. I keep thinking that tomorrow I’m going to read an article where Collins says, “Just kidding! That was just a rough draft. The real third book is coming soon.�

One of the problems with Mockingjay is that the scenes were set all over the map instead of confined within District 12 or the arena. Keeping the action within such a claustrophobic space made for high tension and great story telling. In Mockingjay, there are such long periods of inactivity that I felt as though I might fall asleep. Katniss spends exorbitant amounts of time drugged up in a hospital or just mulling over thoughts in her room. Then something dramatic happens. Every time there is drama, it is always overwhelming and disorganized so that the reader doesn’t know what’s going on and has to go back and read it. Even with the first two books, there were crazy sequences but I never felt like I was so inundated that I needed to go back and re-read. The reader gets almost lazy with all the peaceful parts and when they are slammed back into the pandemonium of battle, they have to wake up and aren’t quite prepared for it. Also, the way Collins repeatedly sedates Katniss and has her wake up later seems like a copout due to an impending deadline to finish the book. In short, the pacing is uneven compared to the first two books where even when not much was happening, the plot moved along steadily. In Mockingjay, the events seemed like one jumbled mess.

The first two novels centered around the games and the reader did not have to think about Panem too much. But once the setting opened up to include the capital and all the districts, suddenly we begin to scrutinize the political and geographical system and all these questions form in our head that never really get answered. How does the government of Panem operate? What about the rest of the world� why don’t they step in to help just as America stepped in to help during the holocaust?

The second problem with Mockingjay is that it wasn’t really a story about our beloved heroine� it was about all the events that happened around her with her pitched right in the middle of it. The last half of the book was so fast paced, one is unable to keep up and register all the deaths. The deaths are not even given proper eulogies. Each death gets about one sentence. Her entire mission to kill Snow seemed exceedingly anti-climatic.

The third problem I have this with this book was that I actually hated Katniss and she’s supposed to be the one we’re rooting for!

I can forgive all the errors of the book if the ending were better written. As I neared the last quarter of the book, I couldn’t believe how many pages were left. Practically none! I couldn’t help but think that Collins better write a fourth book or she’s NEVER going to tie up all the loose ends properly with this many pages left. As more and more pages diminished, my heart was racing and I became increasingly concerned that there wasn’t going to be a showdown with the love triangle. Collins had written a very compelling and ambiguous love triangle in the first two books. The reader falls in love with both Gale and Peeta, and it is anyone’s guess who she’ll choose in the end. Mockingjay lacked a lot of dialogue and interaction almost the whole way through. I know I am not the only one who feels that the love triangle should have gotten more of a center stage in this book. It seemed Collins wanted the third book to be more about the morality and effects of war rather than a love story.

All that being said, I still think the book was decent. It has some good themes and great things to say about the human condition and ethics. I think that Panem could be where our world is heading if we don’t back off from one world order. Collins does a great job painting a gruesome picture of war and if her agenda was to show how pointless war is, then she fulfilled her goal.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
More thoughts on the book, containers spoilers. DO NOT READ unless you've already read the book:

Katniss was so close to getting into the mansion but it didn’t matter anyway because the rebels had already broken through. So many people died for naught including Finnick who we were finally getting to know and love and who just married the love of his life a few chapters before. Not only Finnick but the important person died� Primrose, who was the reason the whole trilogy began. I just hate that Collins killed Prim off. It almost makes the whole trilogy a worthless waste because she was the one Katniss tried to protect from the very beginning.

Katniss seemed cold-hearted toward almost everyone she loved and considered suicide and homicide in several different scenarios to the point where it was almost pathetic and completely out of character for her. Katniss was very hypocritical saying one thing and doing another. Especially at the part where she thinks that the entire human race should just die off for thinking up something as cruel as the Hunger Games and letting it go on for 75 years; then later on, she votes that they have one last Hunger Games using capital children. What?! This seems very uncharacteristic of her.

In the end, Katniss realizes that she would have chosen Peeta anyway, but she should have chosen it for herself instead of being defaulted by Gale going off to district 2 with “a fancy job.� What’s up with that anyway? We don’t even get an explanation or a farewell. He just deserts her without so much as an apology. That's very uncharacteristic of Gale... the young man who would DIE for Katniss. The bomb was an accident and no one could have predicted it. I don’t think Katniss blamed him, but he took off anyway and never tried to comfort her in her pain. There is no closure with our hero, best friend� only confusion and hollow sadness.

The denouement is a meager paragraph. I wanted clarifications. I wanted to be with my favorite characters a little longer before their story ended forever. No dialogue, no emotion. However, we do get a nice line about Peeta being a dandelion in spring� a symbol of rebirth instead of destruction. But that’s all. That’s the end. I enjoyed the epilogue and we are satisfied to know that Katniss eventually got her children, but I still wanted to know if she ever restored her friendship with Gale or if her mother ever got to be part of her grandchildren’s lives. I want to know HOW she and Peeta became lovers. Who made the first move? What was said? Or was it just a quiet, slow progression into love that happened naturally? These romantic parts were what moved the story along in the other books but were basically placed on the backburner in the third book when more than anything, they should have been in the limelight.

Don’t think I am a Hunger Games basher because I’ll be the first to recommend this book to everyone who asks me what they should read next. I’ve even purchased it as a gift for people I love. I am a huge fan� just a disgruntled one!

little longer before their story ended forever. No dialogue, no emotion. However, we do get a nice line about Peeta being a dandelion in spring� a symbol of rebirth instead of destruction. But that’s all. That’s the end. I enjoyed the epilogue and we are satisfied to know that Katniss eventually got her children, but I still wanted to know if she ever restored her friendship with Gale or if her mother ever got to be part of her grandchildren’s lives. I want to know HOW she and Peeta became lovers. Who made the first move? What was said? Or was it just a quiet, slow progression into love that happened naturally? The last line says, “So after, when Peeta whispers you love me, real or not real�.?� After WHAT?! Did they� do it? Or was the “after� referring to their first kiss where she felt “that thing again?� I need to know these things. These romantic parts were what moved the story along in the other books but were basically placed on the backburner in the third book when more than anything, they should have been in the limelight.

Don’t think I am a Hunger Games basher because I’ll be the first to recommend this book to everyone who asks me what they should read next. I’ve even purchased it as a gift for people I love. I am a huge fan� just a disgruntled one!