What Went Wrong?

I’m not usually one to completely disagree with a book.

I mean, a sentence here or there, one or two details, maybe it wasn’t scary enough, minor things sure; I’ll make my opinion known. But rarely do I open up and flat out disagree with how an author chooses to write their story.

But there are exceptions.

Sorry to all the mainstreamers who follow the crowd to keep up with the latest teenage craze, but the most recent exception to my usual tactfulness around books is the all-adored Hunger Game series.

With all the controversies of a savage world where children are brutally maiming and killing each other off, “all-adored” is kind of a stretch. But you have to admit it has built quite the fan base for itself.

I was weary of reading the first book because of how fast it took over the teenage population. I like the hidden treasures, the ones nobody else thought would be worth the money. After finishing it in just over a day, I was hooked. I couldn’t believe that somehow all the violence and the cruel, sadistic world became a fascinating story of freedom fighters and romance.

Another “pro” to The Hunger Games was how Collins could create such empathy for a character that obviously didn’t deserve it. Seriously, whether or not you’ve read the book, go and look it over; try to decipher why Katniss Everdeen deserves our empathy. At first, yes, maybe, but the real talent is how Collins maintains that empathy even as Katniss changes and transforms.

So there you have it, the first book was, in fact, the amazing, addicting, absorbing story that everybody told me it would be.

So where did Collins go wrong?

What made me so absolutely furious?

(I mean so furious that I didn’t tell anyone I’d finished the series, I wouldn’t talk about it; I simply put it down and calmed myself out of the enraged state it had brought me to.)

I had heard that people were having trouble with the second book until they got around to about the halfway point. I completely agree with this; I won’t get into details, but I will say it took Collins a couple chapters to get to the good stuff. You can judge for yourself whether or not you think the beginning was important. I think in the end, it kind of worked; however, overall, it was still a let down.

Basically, The Hunger Games and Catching Fire gave me false hope. After they ended I thought, “Wow! This is great! I can’t wait to see how Collins pulls it all together. I mean, with all the twists and turns so far, the ending HAS to be good.”

Well… There it is. I had finally found it. Suddenly, I knew where Collins went wrong.

She gave up.

Not our beloved Katniss Everdeen, but Collins, the author herself.

When you read these books, you’ll find that big questions are raised. Collins taunts you with them throughout the entire series, dangling the answers just out of reach. This tactic helps propel you through the story even if you don’t actually agree with it, or find good portions of it really boring. All you want is the answers. In the third book, Mockingjay, I feel like Collins wrote it in during that state of mind where you’re not actually asleep and you’re not fully awake. Like when a side effect of a drug is drowsiness and they warn you not to operate heavy machinery.

To me, I got the sense that Collins didn’t know the answers herself. Which is perfectly okay, great novelists often don’t know the ending until they get to it, edit it, revise it, rethink it, and finally go through the whole thing again. On the contrary, in Mockingjay, it seems like Collins just picked the easiest answer, wrote it down, and sent it off. Leaving me with the idea that Collins didn’t actually care how it ended, which in turn, made me not care for how she finished it.

Now I’m not saying Collins can’t write. I would be stupid to do so. The Hunger Games is enough evidence to refute that statement a hundred times over. What I am saying, is that maybe, just maybe, she should have either quit while she was ahead, disregarded the third book entirely, or actually gotten some good nights sleep before she wrote it. Throughout the series all that ever happens is the high-energy, fast-paced, unexpected. Collins went wrong by giving us an ending that is well, quite unexciting and rather expected.

You’re each going to have to judge for yourself; maybe the ending works for some people. As for me, and what I expect from a book, it just wasn’t enough. I would take the time to go into more details, but I love reviewing books and I’d rather not get labeled as a “spoiler”. In the end, The Hunger Games gets an A, Catching Fire walks away with a solid B-, and poor old Mockingjay has to live with a C. Since the story did have some great writing and mainly faltered by not adequately answering the questions, I wouldn’t grade Mockingjay any lower.