Mockingjay

I'm glad this series is over. Mockingjay took forever for me to get through, and most of that lies with its own shortcomings as a thrilling and entertaining book. Webber and I have some long overdue discussion to make regarding the way everything unraveled and ended, but to keep it vague here, I'll just say that I didn't think anything interesting happened until the second-to-last chapter. And by then I was so bored with the story and used to skimming through the dialogue that even when I tried to slow down and embrace the climax, it felt pretty empty and silly. If you've read Harry Potter 7, you probably remember several hundred pages of the characters just waiting around in the woods with brief smatterings of action. I've always pointed to that as a flaw with Harry Potter 7, but perhaps Mockingjay could have been a better novel - and brought better closure to the series - if there was more introspection and less constant war-planning and firefighting. The love triangle that has dominated the series all along felt at its most childish this time around. The lead female character narrated the book with such hopeless and "emo" tones that it was impossible to feel bad for her as she whined about tragedies big and small. She says, "I had always taken the embrace of his arms for granted," in the same depressed candor with which she says, "four hundred children were murdered that night." It seemed a lot like how I expect the Twilight series to read. And as far as the action and plot go, there were a few too many twists and turns for me to appreciate the conflict at hand, which seemed to change every few chapters. I wasn't buying, either, that the teenagers responsible for instigating the violence would also be out on the front lines fighting the battles. For one thing, they're kids. For another, they're important political figures. It all just felt very non-professionally paced and written. Picture the teen-led rebellion in Red Dawn but with a cast of brooding and silently suffering characters straight out of a Final Fantasy game. Weird, right? Perhaps I'm being too hard on this book, but then again, perhaps it could have been a lot better.