At Last... Mockingjay

(Post is spoiler-free)

I waited. Since finishing Catching Fire, I'd counted down the days. Expectations built in my head.

Oh, expectations. Good seldom comes of expectations, especially when books are involved.

Mockingjay was...

I'm having trouble groping for an adjective right now. And I'm a writer. Words are actually escaping me right now.

I got it at midnight, the minute it came out, basically. I had the next two days booked off work, so I could blaze through it. But by the time those two days were up, I wasn't even halfway through. I only finished it yesterday, more than a week after starting it.

How is it that the book I've been anticipating for so long didn't grab me and BEG me to finish it?!

I'm still asking myself this question, and here's the answer I think I have: Mockingjay was good, a satisfying end to an amazing trilogy, but it was not the book I thought it was going to be.

I was expecting an explosive story, an incredibly fast-paced, uber-complicated plot with an earth-shattering revelation at the end. Something that twisted everything we'd previously believed about Panem and the Hunger Games on its head into something completely different.

And what I got was... a whole lot of Katniss.

Katniss is a great character. But Mockingjay's focus was not on Panem, or even the revolution as a whole. Mockingjay was more of a character study than the action/suspense thriller the series had me expecting. It detailed the psychological repercussions of surviving as terrible an ordeal as the Hunger Games beautifully. It was far more literary than the previous two books in the series had been, and that made it feel somewhat separate, for me, kind of out-of-place.

I wasn't disappointed with the ending. I feel like the ending came naturally from the seeds sown in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire. (*spoiler alert*: Although I was a bit vexed that Suzanne Collins took the same route as J.K. Rowling with the epilogue, hers was better because it stayed vague and wasn't cheesy)

I did enjoy Mockingjay, just to find out how everything played out. While I do respect Suzanne Collins' choices in regards to her story, I was a bit disappointed.