Book Review: Mockingjay

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Mockingjay, like its predecessors in The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins, doesn't let you come up for air. Plot complications come one after the other until there's no putting the book down. I found more than once I thought I knew how a scenario would play out only to find it didn't.

That's because the characters are complex and believable. They are teen-agers and friends and sweethearts who live through incredible circumstances that cause them to do unthinkable things, and they win the reader's sympathy. Those emotional storms that blow through a normal adolescence move through theirs even as they make life-or-death judgments in a time of war.

In the end, the novel illustrates how war--adult games at their basest--does more to rip apart interior landscapes of a society's most vulnerable members than it does to the real estate that becomes the battle ground. In the end, isolation and reticence and a reluctance to look the truth squarely in the eye are the biggest obstacles to recovery.

But Katniss Everdeen, Peeta Mellark, and Gale Hawthorne are three young people capable of looking at themselve and asking the big question of how much of their humanity they are willing to surrender to the whims of sadistic, greedy adults who have lost all sight of what it is to take heart and embrace life.

If, when, and how these characters climb over the obstacles the despotic political players in their lives relentlessly throw at them is the story of Mockingjay.

It will take your breath away. Promise.

Movies? Yes! The Hunger Games comes out March 23, 2010. Not soon enough! My daughter says they better do a good job. Yes, movie people, go ahead and try to live up to the book.

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