Mockingjay

SPOILER ALERT: I'm about to talk about the Hunger Games trilogy. Especially the last book, Mockingjay. If you haven't read them and you want to be surprised by them, don't read on. In fact, if you haven’t read them you really shouldn’t read on, and you should instead run to your nearest local bookstore and buy them all. I highly, highly recommend them (but not for children. I don’t care if they’re in the children or young adult section of your local bookstore. They are definitely not for children, and they’re barely for young adults). Plus, it will only take you a few weeks to read the whole trilogy – they’re so engaging you just can’t put them down. Then you can come back and read this blog entry.

Look! Pictures of the books so you can not read the rest of the post if you haven't yet read the series.

I love the Hunger Games books. That sounds a little weird. I mean, why should I love books about children being forced to kill other children? About war and destruction and psychological torture? About a young girl whose life is completely manipulated by the people in power around her?

I love the Hunger Games books because they’re realistic. Katniss is strong, loyal, loving to a select few, extremely cunning, a kickass hunter, and completely broken. She’s imperfect, and she knows it.

Because of all the shit that has happened to her (her father dying in the mines, being sent to the arena twice, having her entire district burned to the ground, watching Peeta’s torture, being manipulated by President Snow, seeing her sister be killed, and on and on and on) she is messed up. She has nightmares and sleepless nights, she lashes out at others, she breaks down at unfortunate times, and she even loses her ability to speak because of psychological damage, not physical damage. The author, Suzanne Collins, presents no illusions about the cost of having to kill, of seeing people die. Katniss is not a perfect hero who just bounces back from everything that’s happened with a smile on her face and a song in her heart.

And that is refreshing. After reading books like the Harry Potter series, or the Eragon series, or the Lord of the Rings series, I always thought to myself, “these people are going to need therapy.” But we don’t see any of that in those books. We don’t see the psychological effects of that much destruction, even though we should. Because no one could witness that much destruction, that much war, without being at least a little messed up.

I relate to Katniss. When I read the books I can feel her need to survive (like when she took care of her mom and sister after her dad died), and I felt that in myself when my mom was sick. I can feel her pain, her grief, her desire to just let morpling or alcohol deaden the pain, because I feel that desire myself. And I feel her wailing, crying, yelling at the cat that Prim is dead, screaming, “she’s not coming back,” because I wail like that myself. Of course, Katniss’ pain and trauma is SO MUCH MORE than I have ever experienced and hopefully more than I will ever experience, so her reactions to the pain are much more violent than mine. I can never fully understand what she’s feeling or thinking. But I do feel the hints of it in my own pain, my own grief. And that is mostly unprecedented in a book of this kind.

So I guess I love the Hunger Games books because they’re dark. They’re painful. They’re violent. But that feels right right now, more right than reading Anne of Green Gables or something else wholesome and sweet.

And I love the Hunger Games books because my mom did. We didn’t get to talk about them much, since I first read them after she was already sick (she had already read them for work, at Hicklebee’s, a local children’s book store), and she couldn’t really articulate all her thoughts about them. But we did get to watch the movie together, twice, and sharing that with her was really special.