Mockingjay in Negative

On to the final book of the Hunger Games trilogy, and that insatiable desire to devour pages at warp-speed to get to the end of the story completely waned, and I finished reading the story at something like my normal reading pace. Whatever that indefinable quality that the first two had that made me desperate to keep flipping pages vanished just as mysteriously as it appeared. I still thought the final book was very good, but at times it didn't seem as if Suzanne Collins was enjoying herself that much, like she just wanted to get through it, and it only really got compelling when she managed to twist the tale around to a Games-type scenario for the last hundred or so pages. Everything else was interesting, but a lot of it could have been summarised. These are the pressures of deadlines, I guess, it's hard to keep the writing as tight as possible when there are publishers badgering you night and day to finish.

What struck me as most interesting about the finale was the negativity of much of the book, and the state of society when the trilogy finished. Surely books like this, in Harry Potter style, are meant to finish with sickly-sweetness and high fives all around, and everybody living happily ever after, but the Hunger Games is a lot more realistic, ending with the impression that no matter what you might change, things will eventually creep back to being just as awful over time. The mood throughout the final book really surprised me, and cemented the series' reputation for me as a cut above most teen-type fiction. I was left feeling glad that there weren't any more books in the series, and as if I'd probably never read anything else that Suzanne Collins writes, but I'll never forget the excitement that the Hunger Games has given me, and I look forward to the day when society takes it on as a serious idea, and I get to watch a load of celebrities running around a forest killing each other instead of sitting in a jungle and eating rats.