Mockingjay: The Final Book of THE HUNGER GAMES.

Mockingjay is the 2010 finale of The Hunger Games, it was released in eBook format before being released in physical format a few days later. It immediately follows up from the cliffhanger ending in Catching Fire, which was an ending that I was not expecting.
Mockingjay is an excellent and powerful, if somewhat disappointing conclusion to the Hunger Games. It could have ended better, but it certainly could have ended worse. There might have been better ways to end it, but I'm glad it's not as bad as the end to Pendragon was. I'd like to know what changes it went through in writing, because that would be interesting (To me at least).
Spoiler warning for those who care.











So the plot concerns the aftermath of the Capitol's carpet fire-bombing of District 12. Peeta's gone missing and Katniss and Gale have somewhat reluctantly teamed up with the rebels in District 13. As with the last two novels, Mockingjay captured my attention and fixed it until the end.
It was about this point in time that I started noticing something. The first book is a solid story, almost standalone. The second one was an amped up exploration of the universe with a strange climactic fight where the heroes are severely injured and a sudden cliffhanger strikes you out of the blue.
Notice anything here?
Star Wars. The Hunger Games is A New Hope, Catching Fire is Empire Strikes Back, and Mockingjay is Return of the Jedi. That's not an inherently bad thing, and that formula isn't exactly a new thing.
Mockingjay is a little slower paced than Catching Fire and The Hunger Games, but it picks up massively towards the end. The whole first part is dedicated to world-building, as it was in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire. It concerns planning for the final attack on the capitol, and then proceeds to handle the ramifications of the fall of a massive empire. Something that Star Wars left for the expanded universe. The book shows a picture of someone who's mad at the world for what it's put them through. It paints a picture of a world that's created a breed of monsters that have risen up to fight other monsters, at the behest of what may or may not be different monsters. The ending is exhausting. And it feels like the characters are as exhausted as you are. And I love it for that. It's a fantastic climactic end to a massive project. There were one or two things here and there I didn't like, but it's not like they were introducing things straight out of nowhere like Harry Potter did in the last two books. Since The Hunger Games movie was so short compared to the book, I'll bet that Catching Fire was as well. And I'll also bet that Mockingjay will be the best one of the three, since it's being split into two movies the way the first two should have been.
All in all, I liked the trilogy and I might record a podcast of me and my parents talking about it someday.
I'll give Mockingjay a 7.4* rating.
Check out my review of The Hunger Games movie.