The Book: Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

A Note: I don’t usually fangirl and I don’t usually buy books the day they are released.  I did both in this time around and I’m oh, so glad.  Because I love the Hunger Games series and I want you to read it too, I want to give you this warning:  While I have tried to steer clear of any Hunger Games or Catching Fire spoilers, just the synopsis may give little bits away.  If you aren’t comfortable with that, go get Hunger Games and Catching Fire, read them and then come back! Rest assured though that there are NO Mockingjay spoilers in this post, so if you’ve read the first two, you can feel comfortable proceeding from here.

The Story: Mockingjay picks up shortly after Catching Fire ended.  Katniss is a hot mess and working on getting fixed up.  The rebellion is going strong in the Districts, but the Capitol is not messing around either.  There’s a war coming and everyone is getting ready for it.  Because of her performance in the original Hunger Games and the following year, Katniss is pretty much the face of the rebellion.  President Snow is coming down hard on her and using manipulation that will get your tear ducts working. In order to protect her friends, family, and every other rebel, Katniss has to make the decision: sit and wait for something to happen or make something happen and deal with the blows as they come.  I’ll give you one guess which one she picks.

What I Thought: Suzanne Collins can effing write.  The characters, the settings, the pacing, the plot… the whole deal…. good work, Mrs. Collins.  You’ve blown me away.

While I liked the first two books in the series, I have to admit that there were parts of Catching Fire that really fell flat for me.  Most of those parts were the parts dealing with the “politics” of rebellion and I was afraid that this book was going to be chock full of that.  In a way it was, but it was just written in a better way, I feel like.  I really latched on to what was happening and found myself totally wrapped up in the whole thing.

I think that what made this book stunning was Suzanne Collins’ willingness to take real issues, strip them down and go through them one by one.  Katniss is kind of this really flawed character and I’ve read several reviews that talk about how they wish Katniss would have done this or that or whatever.  She was seventeen years old.  Seventeen year olds are impulsive and confused and gutsy.  I thought that Katniss was absolutely the real deal.

I never thought that this series was about Gale vs. Peeta… it was more about morality and where to draw the line and how to define friendships and what to do when it seems like there’s no solution.  While the Gale/Peeta question was answered in the end, for me that wasn’t the high point.  The high point was seeing these characters that we’d followed closely and learned to love making decisions that were live and death not only for them but for the whole country.  Gut-wrenching at times, yes, but incredible.

Conclusion: Read this series.  I know it’s YA.  I don’t care how old you are, this is good stuff.

Eek!

Yay! Congrats! I’ll get your pin in the mail asap so you can start wearing it.

Thanks again to everyone who entered!

Less than a week until Mockingjay!

This beaut could be all yours:

Head over here to enter: Mockingjay Pin Giveaway!

When my Border’s went out of business last year, I grabbed all of these that they have left.  This is my last one.  I want one of my lucky little readers to have it.

All you have to do to enter is leave your name/email address in a comment on this entry.

I generally don’t do this, but I’ll give you another entry if you blog/tweet/facebook/pimp my blog out in some way.  Just leave a comment here with the link to your pimping.

I’ll pick the winner August 19th and let you know right away who it is so I can get it in the mail so you can wear this while you’re reading Mockingjay!

Good luck!

P.S. While we’re book nerding out about Mockingjay, may as well watch the trailer again, right? Right.

(Love that it has a blurb from Stephen King. I should have known that he’d be all about this series…)

Also, here is an article from the New York Times that tells me just how OK it is that I’m an adult woman and I’m totally fangirling out over Mockingjay. So there.

I’ll get this in the mail for you asap, because I know you’re going to be wanting to sport it everywhere you go.

Thanks to everyone who entered.  I wish I had one to send everyone…. come to think of it, I may just have another one laying around here somewhere….

I guess you better just keep an eye on the blog to find out

Want it?! I know that you do!

Sign up in the comment section of this post and be sure to include your email so I can get in touch with you if you win!

My plan is to pick and announce the winner (which I’ll just pick from a random number generator) a week from today- on July 24th- and get it in the mail asap.  Mockingjay is releasing on August 24th, so you can spend the last month before the book comes out sporting this incredible little guy.

So fun. I love giveaways.  Tell your friends!

The Book: Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

The Story: This is the second book in a three part series.  The first book was called The Hunger Games and is pretty awesome.  If you haven’t read it, read it.  If you haven’t read The Hunger Games and plan to possibly read it, don’t go any further in my synopsis.  You’ll be mad at yourself later.

This book picks up right where The Hunger Games left off.  Katniss and Peeta are headed back to District 12.  Her family (and Gale) are ecstatic that she is coming home and that they get to live the good life now.  However, (there’s always a “however”) the Capitol is mad.  Mad that they’ve been tricked and that it was by kids and that they got away with it.  They start cracking down and people start getting frustrated.  Little by little, through the first part of the book, little bits, little “clues” start popping up through different sources that under the surface, something larger is happening.

In one really heart-stopping scene, Katniss is hunting outside of the District’s fence and meets some women in Peacekeepers uniforms.  Through these women, we learn that in other districts the sounds of rebellion are even louder and that Katniss is kind of the poster girl for the rebellion.  The Capitol knows this and kind of gets after her.  And, also, The Capitol is crazier than ever.  So, typical dystopian madness ensues.

Also, going on during all of this is the Gale vs. Peeta love triangle story, and another guy is thrown into the pot, just for good measure.  During the second half of the book, Gale is not around to hold up his end of the tug-of-war, but Katniss is still feeling that pull and the readers are reminded of him every so often.  I’m not going to tell you who I’m rooting for, but I will say I was glad that she was with Peeta for what happened in the second half of this book.

I don’t want to give away any more than that, but I do want to say that the last chapter blew my little brain to pieces.  I had to re-read.  Then I had to come home and read some teenager’s blog to make sure that I knew what actually happened.  I didn’t. But thanks to some 16 year old who is clearly smarter than me, now I do.  It’s wild.  It’s a cliffhanger.  I can’t wait to read the third one.

What I Thought: A few of things: First, I always feel kinda silly reading YA books.  I know that a lot has changed in the world of YA books since I was in prime YA years, and that these books are actually well written and thoughtful, but I still can’t shake the fact that I’m reading kid books.  If only this would have started 10 or 12 years earlier.  I would have been all over that crap.  Now I sneak them, all embarrassed, every once in a while. Second, I didn’t want to buy this so I read it over about a month of bookstore trips, with interludes of listening to the audiobook in the car.  So it was all stretched out for me and I found myself confused more than once, just because I had forgotten what had happened when I read a couple weeks ago.  I think that this probably changed how I felt about the book.  Third: I am a sucker for any dystopian book. I eat them up.

How did I feel about the book?  I think it was worth the read.  I did not, however, think that it was better than The Hunger Games.  I guess part of me felt like, even though stuff was happening, that it was just slow. The middle of the book really drug for me.  I think that part of this was that a lot of time was spent setting up the rebellion, and for awhile there was just very little action.

I did love the characters.  I especially love Katniss.  I love that she’s a little trouper and a little thinker and that she just generally kicks butt.  She is kind of naive and flighty and lovestruck (over and over again), but she’s a teenage girl.  I have to admit that I was a little upset to see that Katniss, as a person and as a character has not really developed too terribly much.  I feel like she showed in the second games just how little she had learned in the first games.  Even at the end, she was just marching around without knowing what was going on, ready to kill people.  I just want to see her become a thinker, a decision maker, a leader.

I think that Suzanne Collin’s writing style is kind of incredible.  Her voice is just refreshing to me.  Although I feel stupid parading around with YA books, it is great to know that this is the type of book that are available to kids. She writes about tough issues in this really smart way.  The book makes you think and puts you in these moral situations and leaves you wondering what would you do, how would you respond.  I like this, and I especially like that it has kids in the same place.

Conclusion: Read this series.  I think that this one was weaker, but there is still one more coming and I will read it without a doubt.  And, if you want, I’ve found that swapping dust jackets takes away a lot of the embarrassment of reading kid’s books in public!