A review by alyssabookrecs
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This book and series hold up all these years later. I rarely see such painful themes of war represented so well in YA as they are in the Hunger Games trilogy. Mockingjay deviates from the other two in that the Games are no longer a storytelling frame for the story, except that they so very much are: Katniss is just playing a very different kind of game now and living through war. As a teen, I didn’t fully appreciate how in Mockingjay Collins writes about Katniss being utterly used by Coin and Plutarch, by her PTSD and slow mental unraveling, by how much she is plagued by grief and loss. This book doesn’t read like the others because Katniss has fundamentally changed and finds herself as only a small piece in a much bigger war, and I think that’s incredibly realistic. The ending, as always, had me in tears.