BOOKS: Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins (2010)

Third volume in the Hunger Games series, and theoretically the last, at least until someone offers Collins enough money to continue it somehow. (My thoughts on The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.)

The revolution of the twelve Districts against the Capitol and tyrannical President Snow is in full force, and Katniss finds herself drafted to serve as the Mockingjay, an inspirational figurehead for the rebels. But she's not entirely convinced that she can trust the rebels any more than she could trust Snow, and after surviving two Hunger Games, she's not at all enthusiastic about yet again becoming a pawn in someone else's power struggle.

Mockingjay is by far the darkest of the three books, as I think it had to be if Collins was to remain true to the characters and storylines she'd established in the earlier books. The problem is that she's simply not as interesting writing about political intrigue and paranoid scheming; Mockingjay's ideas about the nature of power go a lot deeper than the (relatively) mindless action-movie thrills of the first two volumes, and it's in those action sequences that Collins is at her best.

That does mean that Mockingjay gets better as it goes along, as Katniss becomes more directly involved in the war; the final invasion of the Capital is, as Katniss and her fellow Games survivors joke, essentially another Hunger Games, but with even higher stakes.

The love triangle is, as I think it's generally been, the least interesting part of the story (but then, I am not a teenaged girl, and they may find it just as moving as it's meant to be), and I think Collins cheats a bit by removing one of the players from the scene and not really requiring Katniss to make a choice between her two suitors.

For all of the flaws I'm grumbling about, though, Mockingjay is a darned good book; it suffers only by comparison to the first two in the series, which were terrifically entertaining. If Collins isn't quite able to maintain that level here, she's still given us a solid and rewarding trilogy that well deserves all of the success and praise it's gotten.