I don’t want to go into too much detail about the book because I do not want to give anything away. What I have written below does highlight a few aspects of the book that I have to mention to get my point across so if you do not want to be spoiled, do not keep reading. You have been warned.
I couldn’t read fast enough. I wanted to keep reading and find out what happened to everyone. I will admit that I wanted to know who Katniss choose – Peeta or Gale – but my main concern was not that. My main concern was whether or not Katniss would be able to fight through her emotions and her confusion and her pain to be the woman she was meant to be.
Seeing a main character as confused and emotionally unstable as Katniss, is not something I believe readers are use to seeing. I believe that most readers (of the young adult variety) are use to reading about characters who have it all, have a tiny little misstep in their goals (a boyfriend breaks up with them or something to that effect) and they go back to being the person they were before after a big epiphany. With Katniss, she isn’t a lighthearted character. She is a strong, damaged character who is fighting every minute of every day to keep her head above water while fighting her emotions to kill everything that has hurt her and the people she loves.
Katniss believes she is so far gone in her mind that she has already counted herself out towards the end of the book. What she doesn’t realize is that she has strength beyond anything she imagined. And the only one that has known that all along is Peeta. He has known from the start of the first book how strong she is.
Now we come to her choice – Peeta or Gale. Both damaged beyond full repair, Peeta and Katniss find love in each other. Gale and Katniss are too similar, have too much fire inside each that Katniss needs the opposite – someone with softness and peace in their hearts no matter what the world threw at them. Neither Katniss or Peeta will ever be the same again but they have each other and I do believe they love each other despite what some readers might think of as settling on Katniss’ part. She never let herself feel anything remotely related to love due to the pain she saw of her fellow neighbors in District 12 when their loved ones died. She had this vision of what being in love would do to her. She thought it would break her and make her weak. When Peeta came along and showed her that someone can love her the way she should be loved, she wasn’t ready for it therefore rebelled against it. But Peeta kept pushing and wouldn’t stop until she knew that love didn’t have to be this scary thing – it can be something to make the world a much better place. It showed her that she wasn’t alone and she didn’t have to be.
I found myself missing the real Peeta – the one from the first two books. He was outspoken, strong, not at all scared (only scared for Katniss). Because of the Capitol, the reader loses the true Peeta forever and that is one of the saddest moments in the whole book. Katniss has damage too but a part of her was already damaged ever since her father died in the mines. She already had hardness to her that no one else did. Everyone else (besides Gale) saw the beautiful things in life no matter what life threw at them. Peeta still sees that at the end but not as much as he used to and that is as I mentioned before, one of the saddest moments in the books. By Peeta and Katniss still damaged, the book went to a dark and damaged place that is not common in many fantasy novels let alone young adult.
Trust was a very scarce commodity in Panem. The only people I trusted in the last 20 pages of the book were Katniss, Gale, Peeta and Haymitch. Shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone but with how many twists came up (Peeta being hijacked by tracker jacker venom) I wasn’t sure what to believe. At some points, you couldn’t even trust what you were reading because Katniss couldn’t trust what she was seeing, hearing and thinking. The reader felt just as out of place, confused and terrified as Katniss. And that is what makes these books an unforgettable series.
I know I will re-read these books. Now that I know how it ends and am not as worried about it, I can go back and pick up things that I didn’t the first time around. Like a good movie, you always miss the little things that gave the ending away. I almost never re-read books but I can see myself re-reading these because they are just that good.
So, with everything mentioned what is this book really about? Is it about a girl? Is it about a rebellion? Is it about trust? This book has so many things going on that it is hard to find the true meaning. I know that I haven’t found it yet and perhaps I never will. What I do know is that this book is about Katniss, a girl who came to the end of her journey growing up in the harshest conditions and finally understood what it meant to be a leader, a friend, a daughter, and feel the love of the one person that as someone told her she needs to survive.
This book was emotionally draining to read – in a positive way. Reading the last 20 pages, you want with every turn of the page to find that everyone is better – Peeta is fully recovered with no fits and Katniss won’t have her nightmares anymore. I was taken aback by the ending. I was not expecting it to stay as dark as it did. But when you put children in an arena and have them fight to the death (and we are talking about more than 1 arena here) the emotional, physical and mental scars that develop may fade over time but will never go away entirely. And that is what this book is about besides a girl finding out who she is in a world where individuality is subdued. This book is also about finding your place in a world where it will break you and try and mold you into something you don’t want to be. To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “to be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” And as Peeta said in the first book, “I want to show them that they don’t own me.” Well guess what Peeta – you did.
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