Games theory

It’s conventional wisdom that Mockingjay is inferior to the other two books in the Hunger Games trilogy.

I’ve read the series twice now. I don’t agree. I think people are mostly reacting to the grimness of the book. For that grimness and unflinchingness, Mockingjay is my favorite of the series.

It’s comfortless by necessity. The trilogy as a whole is one of the few — in or out of YA — that grapples seriously with propaganda, responsibility for choices, the limits of one’s power and how best to use it, how even making a good and right choice might condemn others to pain and death.

Mockingjay is the mortar round that has been fired high up into the air and is whistling down on the reader, an inevitable shell of consequence from all the choices the characters made in the prior books.

(Warning: spoilers might follow.)

What’s also odd is that people — and even some of the same people! — complain about the fairy tale ending of Mockingjay. Did these folks even read the books? The denouement is survival, and barely that. It’s implied that the brutality and monstrousness of humanity has not receded, and perhaps never will. In the end, Katniss lost her sister, Gale, and 95% of the people that she grew up with.

If that’s a fairytale ending, then it’s a shitty fucking fairytale.

Mockingjay is in fact disliked because it’s not really exciting or thrilling, but rather a slog through grief and loss and the consequences thereof. (By the way, one of the points that Collins is making with the Hunger Games books is that we all still do find games of death exciting, vivifying, and that is in fact human — but it’s also an implicit criticism, forcing us to look at ourselves and ask, could we, can we be better? This criticism and examination reaches its critical turn in Mockingjay.)

It’s one of the most adult books I’ve ever read.

Most of the prissy supposed better “adult” novels about similar topics shy away; Collins never does. However, in Mockingjay she shines a million watt floodlight on it all and says, This is what we’ve built, and what we’ve built will destroy us.