In an unspecified time in America's future exists a new country called Panem. This is a dystopian society that is cruel, vengeful, violent, paranoid, and ruthless. In this third book, Katniss is trying to reconcile what the people around her want as opposed to what she wants herself. District 13 and rebel leaders want her to be their mockingjay - the tour de force behind their revolution. This third novel in the Hunger Games trilogy takes a dark turn as our characters are out of the arena but they're still in the Games. Only now the games are real and taking on too many innocent causalities and throwing Katniss's mental health into a tailspin.
At first we think that Peeta is still trying to keep her alive, despite his being captured by the Capitol and most likely tortured. Then we learn that their relationship is about to become extremely rocky as the once docile Peeta is now deranged and confused and inundated with tracker jacker venom and distorted memories. Whatever remains of District 12 is ash and corpse-riddled and the book takes on a crazy quality of Depression-era peasant towns, surrealistic Capitol freak-shows, and the very futuristic underground District 13. Reading this book made me draw connections between Panem and the films, The Island or Logan's Run. People trying to survive in uncertain circumstances and in worlds with different rules. In The Island the perfect people underground are fooled into thinking they will someday get chosen to go "The Island," a perfect society where they will live the rest of their lives in paradise. In reality they are insurance policies and when they go to "The Island" they are actually most likely having their organs harvested for the real version of themselves. In Mockingjay the "soldiers" of District 13 are hoping that they serve a purpose - to overtake the Capitol and create a better world, but oftentimes the truth of that is fuzzy and particularly for Katniss, it's hard to trust the rebel President who sometimes holds the same sadistic and inhuman tendencies as the Capitol's President Snow.
"They have nutrition down to a science. You leave with enough calories to take you to the next meal, no more, no less. Serving size is based on your age, height, body type, health, and amount of physical labor required by your schedule." A life in District 13 is really no life at all ... you are a pawn in a much bigger game played by more important people. Power is dangerous in Panem. Soldier Katniss Everdeen struggles with the strict rules of her new home, and "in some ways, District 13 is even more controlling than the Capitol," which is why in the end she must determine which power-holder needs to be brought down for the world to truly become a better place.
In my opinion, this third book alludes to the forceful hint that if we (today in 2013) don't get our shit together ... if we don't stop the constant wars and fix our broken planet ... the world of the Hunger Games might not be fiction anymore. In this third book, Snow continues to try and unhinge Katniss and play with her emotions, Katniss slowly learns who to trust and who to love, and eventually realizes that all along she needed to have trusted and loved herself more. In the end my only criticism to this final piece in the Games is that it ends and I had a huge urge to know more. How is she surviving, how does Panem rebuild itself, and what is the new government like? Have things gotten better and how is she faring? Does District 12 become alive again or remain just a place that once was? The epilogue is only a couple pages and I want more.
I still feel like this not a book for fifth graders - or at least my fifth graders. I think that some elite-reading sixth graders could maybe grasp it in its entirety, and most likely 7th grade and up will love the series, but I don't want the book's themes and concepts of political and social import to go unnoticed or unheeded by our youth. It would be a great novel for a class book study, as I think we could really push our students' thinking about current events with this paradigm of humanity.
This book had one moral lesson that I have seen in other books, movies, and real life experiences .. and a lesson that should be a constant staple in our education as people "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
In the end Katniss does the bravest thing she can - she stops the past from being repeated. "I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself. I think that Peeta was onto something about us destroying one another and letting some decent species take over. Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children's lives to settle its differences."
Read this book. Read it with your children. Talk to your children about what they think. Push them to think deeper and draw connections between the injustices in this world and the injustices in ours. I'm not saying make your kids read this book to become the next martyr for humanity, but let your kids not that doing the right thing is almost never easy, but it is necessary.
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