WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

When I read the Hunger Games, I devoured Katniss’ adventures in the 74th Hunger Games in a matter of hours. At the end, I put it down knowing that I had just finished a very good book. I set it down with a smile and walked away from it for few months. I finally got the time to pick up Catching Fire and Mockingjay, and those books didn’t leave my hands until I knew. I had to know how it ended, know who she chose, and know how the capital would fall.

The Hunger Games was amazing, Catching Fire was a brilliant bridge between games and war, and Mockingjay was so real and devastating that it was a crime to put it down. Mockingjay was real war, full of real people. I feel as if I cried every five chapters. My heart hurt for characters made of ink. I cried for their pain, for their losses. When Katniss resigns herself to the fact that Peeta is gone, and she is alone, I felt it. I cried the way I cried when Harry Potter walked into the forest with every intention of dying for those that he loves. That is great writing. When Katniss screams at Buttercup that Prim is dead, I felt as if I had lost a sister. When an author can make you feel that deeply about people you will never meet, they have accomplished the hardest task of all.
Hours after I set Mockingjay down, I stumbled in my own world, lost. I felt the way Katniss did in those months after she returned to twelve: alone, shell shocked, and empty. I kept replaying the story in my head, asking myself what could have been done differently, who could have been saved. I want to jump through the book and interfere, and yet I know without that interference, there really was no other way.

Catching Fire was an excellent bridge, a transition, between the old world and the new. It was paced quite quickly, passing by days and weeks at a time in order to get its story told, but it did slow down when it needed to. The first half of the book moved quickly and had you waiting, albeit, waiting on the edge of your seat. What will President Snow do to Katniss and her family? What surprise will he throw in for the 75th Hunger Games? Will something happen to Gale or Peeta to push Katniss’ decision one way or the other? It seems odd when we can finally breath once we are at the Hunger Games. It’s familiar territory, kill or be killed in horribly gruesome ways no doubt, but familiar none the less. Someone had already told me that that Catching Fire would end in a cliff hanger, so I was prepared. Oddly enough I didn’t feel as if it was a cliff hanger. She was in 13, Gale and her family were safe, Peeta was not safe but we knew he was at the capital, and 12 was destroyed. The last chapter of Catching fire was shot heard through the districts, and the beginning of the war. I was simply glad that it had finally started. I wanted the revolution, I wanted to stand with them and rise up against the oppression, and iw as glad it was finally happening.

Mocking Jay was different than the first two books. It was no longer a story of survival against all odds. She was safe, and 13 was going to keep her that way. They needed Katniss for the revolution, and with that knowledge she could not be touched (Forgetting for a moment that it was told in first person present tense). Mockingjay wasn’t just a story of revolution though. Mockingjay was real. It was the story of what happens when the leader in power is no longer powerful, and the leader attempting to take power, isn’t any more suited for it. In the midst of this political and violent head-butting is a nation of people who want to be free. Among them are the victors of these districts, those that have been the most tormented by the former leader, and are now being used by the latter. When I say Mockingjay is real, what I mean specifically, is that Mockingjay pulled from a lot of real world war stories, scenarios, weapons and leaders to the point that it could have been an actual account of some time or place in history.

Because the book felt so real it was incredibly moving. Katniss could not have been more real. I love that Collins, had her not able to cope all the time. I love that she had to hide in closets and behind pipes in order to deal with everything. The fact that Katniss had so many problems with dealing with the reality, made her more real, made me believe she was just a 17 year old girl stuck in the middle of a revolution she didn’t mean to start.

I feel as if I cried as much in this one book, as I did in the entire Harry Potter Series (To be fair, J.K. broke up the deaths a bit more). Here is what I wrote moments after I put the book down.

Crying. Lots of Crying. This book is devastating and beautiful and so real it makes you want to curl up into a ball. I love that Katniss was a real person, reacting the way an actual 17 year old would act faced with the shit she had to face. Every time she curled up in a closet or behind a pipe, I loved her that much more, because she wasn’t a block of stone that could deal with it all. The romance took a back seat in this book and I’m not entirely sure I like how it was dealt with, how it wasn’t her choice but the choice was made for her. There were a lot of deaths in this book that hurt me, and reminded me of the Deathly Hallows, people dying just because it’s war, and Collins knew that they had to, in order to make the war real. You always want to think that if their a big enough character they will be safe, but Collins, much like Rowling knew better, and it was a better story because of that. When you cry for the death of a person made by ink, then the author has done his or her job.

Looking back now, I do have one qualm about the ending, and the final choice between Peeta and Gale. Over the course of the series, Gale, Peeta and Katniss did so many horrible things to each other, and every time you felt as if they would never find a way of forgiving the other. Yet, somehow they always managed to. So when Gale told Katniss that his chance was over because he had failed to protect Prim (and possibly contributed to her death) I could not believe that this would be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Even though we saw a lot of Prim, and Katniss talked about Prim a lot, I didn’t feel a close tie to her; I didn’t feel as if she was quite as three dimensional as the others. Her death didn’t bother me, until it visibly bothered Katniss. Because I didn’t believe that Prim’s death would leave Gale in the wind, I grew angry at him when he stopped being around. I was angry at Gale just as I was angry at Katniss’ mother for leaving her alone in District 12 with no one but a drunk Haymitch and Greasy Sue. When Peeta show’s up you are simply glad that someone has come to her rescue. The choice of Peeta then, is no longer a choice.

She doesn’t choose Peeta because Peeta is the person she couldn’t survive without (as Gale said the choice would come down to previously), he is not chosen because she loves Peeta more than she loves Gale. Peeta is chosen because he is the only one who didn’t abandon her. Personally if I had to choose between two men, and one took a special assignment as far as humanly possible from me, and never spoke to me while I had to deal with the death of my sister, the desertion of my mother, and the end of a revolution, I wouldn’t chose him either. Maybe that was something we should have seen all along, that while they both loved her, Peeta loved her selflessly, willing on more than one occasion to lay his life and well-being down for her, while Gale’s was a selfish love because he didn’t want to live without her. There is a subtle difference, as they both risk their necks for her, and both want her to survive but one want is simply to live with another want is to live with her.

I agree with the choice, but I wish that there was more of a discussion of it. I wanted to know that Katniss felt like Gale had abandoned her. I wanted her to stew over blaming him for Prim’s death. I wanted her to realize that she needed the dandelion and not the fire, before the choice was taken out of her hands. She was broken, and she needed the gentle, soft touch of healing fingers, not the poking and prodding of a fire underneath her, but she should have been the one to see it long before it was staring her in the face.

I loved this series, and I still find myself staring off into space thinking about it. Not changing any bit of it, but wishing I could have been there to help. The series gets five stars, and to be a bit more specific, Hunger Games and Mocking Jay get sixs on a five point scale while Catching fire gets a 4.5.

A quick additional note about characters. I started thinking about specific characters after I finished writing the rest of this, and thought I would add a few thoughts. In Hunger Games my favorite character had to be Rue. We knew her just enough to love her before she was ripped from us. In Catching Fire and Mockingjay however, there was only one real contender for my heart. It wasn’t someone you might think of, like Peeta or Gale. It wasn’t them, it wasn’t Prim, and it certainly wasn’t Haymitch, no matter how much he showed his love for Peeta and Katniss. No, It was Finnick. Lovely, beautiful Finnick that was so strong for so long. He is the male Katniss, doing what he has to do for the person (or in her case people) that he loves. He puts on so many different faces and is so strong even before you realize what his motivation is. It makes me angry that he had to die because he fell into the rule of any character who gets to be happy before the war is over, never ends the war happy, but his this makes his sacrifice all the more meaningful. Finnick is my character hands down, if only he would have lived for me to tell him.