mockingjay review, WITH SPOILERS. and block quotes.

WARNING: This review contains SPOILERS. Big ones! If you've already read Mockingjay or you are some kind of weirdo who doesn't mind spoilers, read on. If you haven't read the Hunger Games series, you probably shouldn't read this either, because most of it will not make sense and I'll only ruin the last book for you.

Sometimes you want to like a book so much, it takes you a while to admit that it did not, in fact, meet all your expectations. Such was the case with Mockingjay, the final book in Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy.

Suzanne Collins could have knocked it out of the park with Mockingjay. All the ingredients were there. Collins had set so many wonderful, complex and exciting dynamics in motion by the end of Catching Fire. Sadly, so many things just didn't pay off in the way I hoped they would.

Remember this, from Katniss and Peeta's Victory Tour in Catching Fire?

You can feel something in the air, the rolling boil of a pot about to run over. Not everywhere. Some crowds have the weary-cattle feel that I know District 12 usually projects at the victors' ceremonies. But in others--particularly 8, 4, and 3--there is genuine elation in the faces of the people at the sight of us, and under the elation, fury. When they chant my name, it is more a cry for vengeance than a cheer. When the Peacekeepers move in to quiet an unruly crowd, it presses back instead of retreating.

Perhaps my favorite thing about Catching Fire was the way Collins captured the feeling of a revolution starting. People beginning to shake off the fear that used to paralyze them, suddenly having the courage to challenge power that seemed invincible only yesterday, solidarity and defiance blooming out of alienation and despair seemingly overnight. This was reflected in the Games of the second book--from the tributes holding hands in the beginning, all the way through to the epic win of an ending, when Katniss turns her arrow not against a fellow victim of the Capitol's game, but against the game itself. At the end of Catching Fire, the stage was all set for Panem's mass popular revolution to begin in earnest.

So I was disoriented and distressed to find this popular element almost entirely missing from Mockingjay. It's like Collins forgot about all the social power she set into motion in the second book and somehow decided the only way to overthrow the Capitol was with a conventional military force. Enter District 13.

I hated District 13. I was suspicious of them the moment I learned they really did have nuclear weapons, because I didn't believe that Collins would ever make people who rely on nuclear terror the good guys. And they aren't, really.

Bringing District 13 into the mix destroys one of the best things about the series, which is the asymmetry of the conflict--the will and solidarity and creativity and ingenuity of ordinary people against the massive military power of the Capitol. Watching teenagers pwn the Capitol with improvised weapons was one of the things that made the books great. It doesn't work the same way when you start relying on a conventional military power.

I know we aren't supposed to like District 13--or, I should say, the leadership of District 13 (its people are strangely undifferentiated and passive.) But the problem is that while Collins doesn't encourage us to like Coin and her army, she can't quite dispense with them either. She relies on them to win the war. It's like she can't quite trust the popular revolution she set in motion in Catching Fire to actually take power.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the biggest missed opportunity of the whole book: the attack on the mountain-encased military base called the Nut in District 2. There's something that feels so wrong about districts fighting districts, and to her credit, Collins lets her characters think so too. The sudden flashback to the mine accident that killed Katniss's father is a total surprise, a scene I never expected to see, but it's brilliant. When Katniss looks at the people she's supposed to be fighting, she sees not enemies, but her own family. Instead of feeling victorious, she feels manipulated and sick. And to top it off, her scripted, stage-managed television appearance (in a series that's so much about the power of media) is interrupted by the real-life, bloody consequences of her actions. Katniss seems to realize that they're going about this all wrong, that she's just back in the Games again, fighting the wrong enemy. And she gives one of her best speeches of the entire series:

"Who is the enemy?" whispers Haymitch. [Nice callback to the end of Catching Fire, SC.]

"These people"--I indicate the wounded bodies on the square--"are not your enemy!" I whip back around to the train station. "The rebels are not your enemy! We all have one enemy, and it's the Capitol! This is our chance to put an end to their power, but we need every district person to do it!"

YEEAAAHHHH! I'm thinking at this point. This is what we've been waiting for! Katniss is going to unite the districts--not as a figurehead, but as an actual military leader. The final battle against the Capitol is ON! I'm ready for someone to start singing the Marseillaise.

But instead, Katniss gets shot.

I kept waiting for confirmation that it was one of Coin's people who shot her. This would have made perfect sense, because Coin obviously sees Katniss as a threat, unscripted Katniss as a bigger threat, and Katniss with the power of the districts behind her as the biggest threat of all. But there is never any textual evidence to support this theory, so as far as we know, Katniss was shot by someone random who clearly wasn't listening very closely to what she was saying. I think this says a lot about how Collins feels about human nature.

In hindsight, I think this is where the book started to derail. This should have been the moment Katniss took the offensive and started calling the shots herself, making all her friends and allies choose sides and setting her up for an inevitable conflict with Coin. I thought maybe Coin was going to threaten to nuke the Capitol, and Katniss and friends would end up racing against time to stop the war before that happened. (That would have been cool, wouldn't it?) Instead, Katniss gets taken out of the action at a crucial moment with an injury.

This exact same thing will happen again, later, only the second time it will be infinitely more frustrating. It's like Collins is afraid to let Katniss take control of the story. The same way she doesn't quite trust or understand how to let the revolution she created take power, she can't quite trust her main character to move from figurehead to general, from reacting to driving the action herself.

In retrospect, this is a problem that plagues the entire series. My one discomfort with Catching Fire was that for the whole book, Katniss was a pawn in a game she didn't understand. It made her look stupid. I just assumed the third book would be when she finally came into her own. I was concerned when she wasn't part of the mission to rescue Peeta, but I was temporarily mollified by the twist of Peeta being insane, which was a cruelty that seemed genuinely worthy of the Capitol's sick imagination. But the place where Katniss's lack of agency drove me to distraction was in the final assault on the Capitol.

I guess this is the place to just come out and say it: I flat-out hated Prim's death. I will accept the death of almost any fictional character--provided it's earned. It was not. It was cheap and useless and didn't serve any dramatic purpose. The possibility of Prim being on the front line was never even planted as something we were supposed to be worried about. Then there is the fact that Katniss's trek through the Capitol had already been bloody enough. It had claimed the lives of quite a few characters we'd come to care about. Gale had just been captured and Katniss had failed in her one final promise to kill him in order to spare him a miserable slow death by torture. The stakes were already high enough without throwing Prim in there out of nowhere.

Killing Prim does something else. It short-circuits the entire trilogy. This whole story was set in motion because Katniss wanted to save Prim. While Katniss certainly couldn't have known how things would turn out, having her die anyway sends an awfully fatalistic message, doesn't it? Whether Collins intended it or not, it kind of makes you question whether everything Katniss did was worth it.

I don't think I would ever have been fully comfortable with Prim's death, but I might have accepted it if it had propelled Katniss directly into the president's mansion, into the final conflict with Snow and/or Coin. But that doesn't happen.

No matter what you think about Prim's death, the fact that the Capitol fell while Katniss was in the hospital is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. It's such a fatal dramatic error that I actually had to read that chapter twice to realize that's what happened. The whole trilogy had been preparing us for a showdown between Katniss and Snow. It's Katniss's one consistent goal throughout the book: I kill Snow. As Katniss approaches Snow's mansion, her mission couldn't be clearer: Kill Snow. End the war. And she fails.

I would have accepted a last-minute twist in the confrontation with Snow. (Like, maybe, Coin already being there, negotiating a surrender with him while their respective armies slaughter each other outside? And Katniss deciding to kill Coin instead, because she realizes Snow's power is already broken. That would have been cool, right?) But taking Katniss out of the action at this point with a near-fatal injury--one inflicted by people supposedly on her own side--made me want to throw the book against the wall.

Katniss's last mission was plagued with so much danger and bad luck and impossible odds, so many characters who risked or lost their lives to see her succeed, that having her fail at the last minute felt like a horrible sick joke. It made Katniss look criminally stupid and the whole ending section in the Capitol feel cheap.

So why did Collins do it? Either it was bad writing, or there was a purpose. Let us assume for a moment that it was not bad writing and that Collins was trying to say something.

Because Prim was killed by the rebels (or at least by a splinter cell acting on Coin's orders) the only message that I can possibly extract from this horrible dramatic choice is a kind "pox on both your houses" condemnation. The Capitol is awful, but the rebels are just as bad. Or, if they didn't start out as bad, they've become the very thing they're trying to destroy by engaging in war.

There are many scenarios under which I wouldn't have any problem with an antiwar message like this. Collins's other series, the Underland Chronicles, has a powerful antiwar message much along the same lines. And there it works beautifully, because the Underland Chronicles are all about the moral problems of conventional war. The different species in the Underland fight each other over land and resources and all kind of stupid shit, with conventional armies of approximately equal power. Their wars are useless and destructive. In this context, an antiwar message is not only radical and humanist, but logically the only dramatically satisfying conclusion to the series.

But the war in Mockingjay isn't a conventional war. It's a revolution. And the problem with tacking on an antiwar message at the eleventh hour is that you've just spent the better part of three books convincing us that Panem needs a revolution and the Capitol deserves to be overthrown. "A pox on both your houses" doesn't exactly fit with "We all have one enemy, and it's the Capitol!" In this context, an antiwar message becomes reactionary, because what's the alternative? The status quo? Not to resist at all? That would make a very boring book, wouldn't it?

Nevadeline, perhaps the only person who shares my obsession with the political book review with equal passion, suggested that maybe Collins is trying to show what happens when a genuine popular revolution gets taken over by people who are fighting the old order because they want to be the new ruling class--people who don't really plan on being less oppressive than the old ruling class. I wish I thought Collins was this politically sophisticated, but I don't think she is. I think if that was what she was going for, we would have seen some conflict between Coin and the folks who organized the uprisings in Catching Fire, instead of all those folks just kind of mysteriously disappearing in Mockingjay. I also think it's hard to reconcile that analysis with this quote, near the end of Mockingjay:

They can fatten me up. They can give me a full body polish, dress me up, and make me beautiful again. They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them. I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself.... Snow thought the Hunger Games were an effective means of control. Coin thought the parachutes would expedite the war. But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.

Yes, no one. Except the people who never have to send another child to the Hunger Games. Who maybe don't have to live the rest of their lives behind electric fences and under Peacekeepers' guns. Who don't have to watch all the fruits of their labor be loaded on trains to the Capitol while their families starve. Who maybe, just maybe, have a chance at a more equal society. They benefit.

People may fight conventional wars for the interests of those in power, but we fight revolutions for ourselves. Collins seems to have lost track of this distinction somewhere along the line. Revolutions--even revolutionary wars--are waged for liberation. There is no guarantee the new order will be better than the old, but if people are willing to risk their lives, it's because the old order has become intolerable, and because something has given them hope that a better world is possible. You can argue about what methods and targets are moral or justified. You can question whether the leadership of District 13 is really on the same side as the ordinary people of Panem. You can debate whether war is actually necessary when the districts produce everything and the Capitol produces nothing. (I wish someone had! That's what general strikes are for.) But you cannot read these books and come out thinking that it is not justified to resist the Capitol.

What Mockingjay was missing most was a sense of hope. One of the reasons that Harry Potter feels like a realistic resistance story even though there are wizards and house-elfs and magic is that JK Rowling gets the emotional landscape right. Resistance has highs and lows. So there's grief and rage and terror and guilt and self-doubt and despair, but there's also love and camaraderie and purpose and liberation and empowerment and joy, and, sometimes, victory. And they're all mixed together and unpredictable, which is what makes resistance stories great fun to read and write.

The best moments from the first two books were the highs: the moments of defiance or humanity or triumph in the face of oppression--the little moments of victory for ordinary people against the Capitol. These little sparks could have grown into something much bigger, into a blaze that devoured the whole rotten system. But only if you believe these moments weren't just "symbolic resistance," but were the actions of people actually capable of remaking the world in their own interest. Only if you really believe ordinary people working together are capable of defeating even the most ruthless oppressor.