“I will have to travel from district to district, to stand before cheering crowds who secretly loathe me, to look into the faces of the families who children I have killed…”
By page four of Catching Fire I am swept away with emotion.
When I left the heroine of The Hunger Games, Katniss, I thought I could easily hold it together until she returned in its sequel. How wrong I was.
When I was able to read an advanced copy, I found myself pinned to the couch, taking only time to eat one meal…forcing myself to stop at 1am with 40 pages to go.
Why?
I didn’t want to finish, and then force myself to sleep. I knew I would need to debrief with somebody…anybody who would listen. But in that 10 hour marathon I found myself exquisitely torn between Gale, her companion of the forest and Peeta, her counterpart in the games. How as this possible? I was sure I knew clearly who she should make a life with. But Suzanne Collins weaves us into the fabric of Katniss in such a way, that like her…we don’t know what we want. And like her, we are not given time to determine how to feel about life beyond the Hunger Games, because the ramifications of her success are clearly bigger than any one character.
Smart, Smart, Smart, I found myself forced to write at the top of the page.
The trapping of many dystopian novels is the contrived power of the oppressor. It becomes too easy for the “all powerful” to control and weld a course of action simply because it creates the next layer of conflict, leaving the reader feeling cheated.
But, once again, even more so than in The Hunger Games, Collins intricately weaves the story so that all things on the next page, have roots somewhere in its predecessors…finding a balance of surprise and self-directed validity so often missing in today’s fare.
Moments of character driven heartache, actions of human dignity, points of herculean courage left me laughing, weeping, and shattered all at once…but “hungry” for more…
Susan Thompson
High School Librarian, AZ
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