MOCKINGJAY (BY) SUZANNE COLLINS

Published 2010, 390 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B-
Plot: B
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B

Suzanne Collins Hunger Games trilogy could have gone either way for me after its second installment, the disjointed and choppy Catching Fire. Book one, The Hunger Games, was an unflinching speed-read, even if it wasn't particularly inventive or well written.  All those problems came to a head with the middle installment, but Collins makes an impressive effort to right them here.  The writing improves, just enough. The plotting improves, just enough.  The characters — alright, the characters are still either surprisingly dark or totally bland, but I suppose its forgivable.  These books were always about plot, and here again, Collins writes like she knows what she's doing.

After Katniss wins her first Hunger Games, wrapping up the main conflict of the first book, Collins was obviously in something of a bind.  The hero of the story needed something to do in the second installment, so Collins had her accidentally spark a rebellion — which, it turns out, is a surprisingly passive role anyway.  Still lacking anything direct to do with Katniss halfway through, Collins threw her into a second Hunger Games, which helped to develop the action, but not the story or the outside factors shaping it.  Finally, in Mockingjay, Collins figures out what to do with the larger world, forcing Katniss to participate in the war against the Capitol as rebellion sweeps across the land.  When the bad guys eventually crumble, it feels inevitable and unearned, but it's still exciting.  When Katniss and her pals launch one last huge offense against the Capitol itself, it feels satisfying, like the series is at last achieving what it was meant to, even if it's not doing so in particularly groundbreaking fashion.

The real strength of the trilogy was never Collin's originality, whether in the broad scope and direction of the plot, or the little details that provide the mayhem.  At its worst, the series could sometimes feel like a video-game, a series of arbitrary problems with arbitrary solutions that the characters never had to work for. What made the trilogy work — especially as a YA series — is how dark Collins was willing to go, and that's really the case here.  Mockingjay gets dark.  Never particularly visceral or gory, which would have almost been easier; some of the directions the plot takes are unnerving in a subtler, stranger way, things you wouldn't expect to pop up in a story meant for a younger age group.  What makes the plot here stand out — to become maybe the best of the trilogy — is how that sense of darkness and cynicism creeps into the background and tone of the story, creating a world where, remarkably, a battle of rebels against their tyrannical government doesn't just turn into an easy case of good versus evil.  It would have been simple for Collins to leave out the shades of gray, but she doesn't flinch.  The deeper into the story we go, the more clear it is that there are no good guys and bad guys. While Mockingjay may lack the nuance of social critiques like 1984, it also has the good sense to maintain a completely sincere "trust no one" cynicism.

These unexpectedly dark turns help to conceal what remains one of Collin's greatest weaknesses: the dullness of the series' side-characters.  As before, Collin's choices as an author remain more interesting than the choices her characters make.  Many side plots end in ways that I did not expect at all, despite revealing nothing new or interesting about the characters making those choices.  (The love triangle that strung out through the whole trilogy certainly ends differently than I was expecting, without resorting to cheap melodrama.) Ultimately, the trilogy works as a series of action novels, as long as you aren't expecting anything particularly clever. Here in the last book, Collins must have felt obliged to up the ante and add some craziness, but she just doesn't seem to have the imagination for it.  The last third of the book reads like a video game, with a silly, extremely-forced series of challenges set up to provide danger to the characters.  The big dramatic climax is something of a let-down as well, and kind of nonsensical — odd, considering how tight the action in the series generally was. Collins can't seem to break out of a certain formula of violent adventure sequences, even when those sequences make no sense to the world she's scripting.

Then there's the whole reality-TV angle the series takes — a major background device that I haven't even discussed before, because I honestly don't know what to make of it.  Collins seems to be attempting some sort of commentary on war as spectacle, the role of television in both controlling the masses and inspiring them. The idea is there, the basic framework to draw out some kind of statement, but she just never does anything with it.  It sits awkwardly at the fringes of the plot, like that weird college dormmate who would come into your room, sit on your bed, and watch you write from over your shoulder, and you were like, "Hey Zach, did you want something?"  But he didn't want anything.  He was just sitting there, with nothing better to do, like the reality TV subplot of The Hunger Games. There's the assumption throughout the series that everything Katniss does is going to be televised — first for the Capitols' benefit, because I guess they're into that real horrorshow stuff, and later to keep the rebellion going.  But once the Capitol is being invaded, the last battles are being fought, who's sitting at home still watching their TV?  And why?  Everyone we see is described as poor and overworked.  No one, in the entire series, is ever shown even watching a television, or owning one — they're just forced to watch some big screens in the town square when the Hunger Games are being broadcast. It feels like Collins is writing a device for our world, not this one — TV shouldn't have much impact on these characters, and she never even attempts to explain why it would.

With the nature of the world around Katniss so unclear, the actions and directions of the plot seem sort of context-less when you think about them too much.  Things just happen because, well, they happen.  So much here serves the action, makes the danger momentarily more thrilling, but actually reduces the overall coherency of the book. These issues didn't ruin any one of the books or the impact of the series as whole, but they were bothersome enough to keep anything from really resonating with me.  I was entertained, but not particularly impressed. Still — if I had kids, I would give them the series.  The Hunger Games trilogy may not answer any profound questions, but at least it sort-of, kind-of raises them.

CATCHING FIRE (BY) SUZANNE COLLINS

Published 2009, 391 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: C+
Plot: B-
Pacing: B-
Poignancy: B

I don't really understand how Collins does it, but Catching Fire (aka book 2 of The Hunger Games trilogy) continues a series that is somehow, simultaneously, one of the catchiest yet sloppiest series I've ever read. Random internet visitors who accidentally stumble upon my site while deciding how to spend their government bailout dollars by purchasing a large boat, multiple crates of red wine, and copies of their favorite YA action-adventure series will no-doubt jump down my throat in the comments section for this slight. So don't get me wrong: I'm still plowing through the series like a fat man going down a flume-ride poured with gravy. And I'm definitely still enjoying the ride. These are some catchy books, but Catching Fire begins to form noticeable cracks that irritate the critic in me. The Hunger Games showed signs of those same flaws, but its relentless pacing and well-written action bullied them to the side.  Here, facing middle-book-of-the-series syndrome, only a sense of momentum really keeps the novel from falling apart.

Sadly, most of the book's flaws are fairly obvious. Collin's strength is as a plot-architect, not as a writer, but she undermines herself as both here.  A good chunk of the story, particularly in the first quarter of the book, is basically told in expository chunks of summary.  As a first person narrative, obviously a lot of the tale will be internal musings by Katniss, its main character.  But when you're writing around a fast-paced, action-packed plot, its a really bad idea to have half the action happen not only off-screen, but in the past.  Katniss spends an awful lot of Catching Fire summarizing what happened in the first book, then explaining events going on in the present that she's just not around for. Other great books have violated that fundamental show-don't-tell principal — specifically, I'm thinking Lord of the Rings, which had a lot of off-screen action summarized neatly for the audience, but only because the world was so big and dense and rich.  Everything about the Hunger Games trilogy, on the other hand, already seems sparse. We're never directly shown enough of the world in the first place to make those off-screen events truly resonate.  And with Collins forced to move away from the simple brutality of the Games, into the complex political tensions of the Capitol and its districts, I remembered why the running background tensions of longer series like Harry Potter led to a real sense of urgency and in-world reality — because we had time to get attached, to care about places we'd already been to.  The tension of the Hunger Games world — the struggle of some peasants against their tyrannical government — rushes through standardized emotions and developments that work mostly because they're so familiar.  There's not much to feel here, just a lot to experience.

And fine, Catching Fire doesn't need to be an exquisitely detailed book.  I think 90 percent of its charm is its rapid pace, its thin-ness, and a more structured narrative would work against its lightning plot.  But the plot of Catching Fire should have been stronger, that's all.  When all the summarizing and plot-setup are finally out of the way, freeing the story up to move forward, what does Collins do?  Give us a second-half twist that turns Catching Fire into a rehash of The Hunger Games.  It does move the plot along, but as fun as it is, the change of pace basically destroys any tension, like there's even less at stake than the first time around just because everything is so rushed. Once again, few side characters are given a chance to develop.  And while Katniss herself becomes a more interesting heroine than I expected, the people she bases most of her emotions and actions around never have the chance to demonstrate why. One of Katniss' main motivations in the book is, at least as she explains, saving her younger sister from any more pain.  But that sister is only in the book for a few pages — and not many more in the first installment — making her something of an emotional human MacGuffin.  Same with Gale, one of the two boys competing for the affections of Katniss.  (Rather inexplicably, considering she's a selfish asshole most of the time, but that level of unlikeability is actually one of the most surprising, interesting things about the series.)  Gale is never developed, or even really described, as anything more than a handsome, surly teenager, yet this blank slate of teenage hormones drives half the things that happen in the book.

For all its shortcomings, Catching Fire is still an entertaining book.  And The Hunger Games trilogy is still a series I would recommend that anyone check out.  I should probably be about 14 years younger than I am to fully enjoy it, but I do think it's better — and darker, and more daring — than most of what I likely read at that age.  I don't think it will go down as one of the classics.  Not unless the movies are gangbuster, anyway.

THE HUNGER GAMES (BY) SUZANNE COLLINS

Published 2008, 384 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B-
Plot: B
Pacing: A
Poignancy: B

The many thousands of loyal readers of The Luxury Review may have noticed that it's been a long time since I posted a book review.  Well, that's because it's been a while since I've been able to finish a book. Pretty sad, I know; I feel nightly remorse about this. These last few months, I guess I just had too much on my mind.  Too much stress to detach from my own world and enter another.  I couldn't get through anything — dense, intricately-written literary medications were just not appealing to me.

I guess that's exactly why books like The Hunger Games remain incredibly popular.

Usually I don't spend much time writing out a plot synopsis for the books I review.  Here, I don't think I really could.  The plot of The Hunger Games is literally Battle Royale. Haven't seen or read it?  Well, here: Kids are drafted via lottery by the evil government, tossed into a giant playing field and forced to fight to the last-man-standing in a sort of reality TV brutal death game. Our heroine, the unfortunately named Katniss Everdeen, has to try not to die.  Boom.  It's straightforward. It's short and lean and uncomplicated. It is also, thankfully, riveting.

It would be tempting to say that writing a "young adult" book limits an author, since you can only get away with so much gore and sex and darkness and pain when you're writing for teenagers.  But it works both ways, and I think Suzanne Collins made a smart, calculated choice when writing this series for a youngish audience.  As a "regular" book, The Hunger Games would be accused of lacking complexity.  There's never a sense that there's much out there, beyond the walls of the arena or the simple narrative.  Granted, this is just the first book of a trilogy, a trilogy that was planned from the start, so maybe the scope opens up a bit with later installments.  Regardless, it seems okay — it's obvious that Collins set out to write this book for a specific audience, so it never feels like she's just being lazy  (I'm not saying teenagers all have short attention spans.  Obviously, the latter Harry Potter books were gigantic, but books trying to break in to a younger audience are expected to be fast-paced, quick reads, regardless of their length.)  Of course, writing a book this fast and lean and engaging takes skill too, just of a different sort than writing dense Pynchon-ian epics.  You have to know what to cut, what to leave, and how to make the little material left in your streamlined plot as engaging as possible. Short and lean can still be boring, but not here.  There isn't a dull moment or unnecessary page in this whole novel.  As simple as the tale is, Collins knows how to tell it well.

So while I found The Hunger Games entertaining, even refreshing, it's not without its surprises.  And it's certainly not without weaknesses.  Despite what I just said about YA adults not getting away with as much complexity as "regular" novels, The Hunger Games does get surprisingly dark.  This is a book about two dozen teenagers forced to brutally murder each other, after all, and Collins doesn't take easy outs even when she could.  Some of the scenes in The Hunger Games are genuinely disturbing, despite the characters driving them lacking depth.  In other ways, Collins does take the easy way out, tossing in a half-dozen deus ex machinas that she could have easily worked around.  The nature of the game itself is sort of a DEM, since the Gamemasters can control everything and anything within the arena, apparently — they control the temperature, the weather, the food, the animals, the water, etc.  And this is where the lack of depth in the world at large becomes problematic — when writing about an evil dystopian government, it helps to give them some context, some general clues as to the scope of their powers.  Cameras film every move of everyone in this vast forested arena, but no character ever mentions seeing a camera, or any piece of technology at all.  (I guess the cameras were some kind of omnipresent nanobot swarm or something.)  And while there's suspense, the book remains fairly predictable.  The surprises deal more with how than what, since the actions every character takes seem a bit pre-ordained by their generic types.  In other words, Collins' choices as an author hold more surprises than any of her characters do.

Still, The Hunger Games is designed to not need context most of the time.  It's kill or be killed, and everything is just solid enough to hold up that premise without cracking.  Side characters are archetypal, and never have enough page-time to develop the quirks and habits that might make them truly believable.  The world, too, is generic, but it's never the focus of the book, so it doesn't matter.  Everything here is so focused on what does matter — survival, etc. — that there's no chance to look away, and no point when you'd ever want to.