Well, dear readers, I waded through both Catching Fire and Mockingjay yesterday, and my emotions were mixed. There were elements I liked, but the violence was so constant that I found myself actually bored by it—out of a few hundred speaking roles, how many characters survive? Twenty? Fifty? Literally everyone else bites it, and most of 'em in the most hideously gory way possible.

For those of you who've skipped this series, Catching Fire and Mockingjay are the sequels to 2008's The Hunger Games, which we reviewed here. In Catching Fire, Katniss struggles to deal with the fallout from her unconventional Hunger Games victory as the Capitol forces her to participate in the creepy spectacle of the post-Games events. In Mockingjay, Katniss joins (not fully by choice) the rebel movement of District 13, but it's unclear if her new “allies” are better or worse than her old opponents.

There are a lot of things to admire about this series. Katniss is a wonderfully complex character, and Collins does a superb job of taking current trends and pushing them to their creepiest extremes—at their best, these books have some of the disturbing topicality of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Her love triangle (which is less of a plot point than the plethora of “Team Peeta” and “Team Gale” t-shirts available on the Internet would have you believe) adds a human touch to the story, without being irritatingly dragged out.

Unfortunately, many of these virtues were hard to appreciate after yet another chapter full of decapitations, mutilations, and flesh-melting. (At one point, Nathan walked into the room and asked me how Mockingjay was going. Choosing a sentence at random, I started reading aloud: “My face lands in a still-warm puddle of someone's blood...” That's seriously how the book goes. Practically every page!) I still managed to enjoy myself—I have a strong stomach—but I'm sincerely hoping that the next series from Suzanne Collins heads in a very different direction.

Labels: Book Reviews, Suzanne Collins