Tag Archives: 100 novels project

Books Thirteen, Fourteen and Fifteen: The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay

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Okay, whoa.

I picked up The Hunger Games because I kept hearing how fantastic it was, both from adults and (second-hand) from my spouse’s grade six students. And while I don’t normally go for young adult fiction anymore (and mostly didn’t even as a young adult) I found by about page five that I couldn’t put this book down.

So then I figured, well, if you’re going to read a book so compulsively, you’d better figure out what it is that’s making you do it.

It came as no surprise to me to read that Suzanne Collins wrote for television before she became a novelist. The Hunger Games is perfectly plotted – it follows the three-act format so often touted in how-tos for screenwriting (and now for novel-writing, too). There’s nothing extraneous here. We meet Katniss Everdeen and her family on the day of the reaping, we’re introduced to Gale Hawthorne and see how he and Katniss defy the laws of the Capitol – by hunting – to save their families. And then boom, we’re faced with Katniss’ first big choice, when she steps up to take her sister’s place in the Games.

After that, all bets are off. You just have to let the plot take you where it will, and where it takes you is a pretty wild ride (from YA standards, certainly).

Of course, once I finished the first book I had to run out and buy books two and three. I found them both at the supermarket, beside an empty space for the first instalment. I snapped them up and have promised to donate them to Wildwood Elementary’s grade six class, for whom apparently two copies of everything is not enough.

I devoured the second book just as quickly as the first. Same reason – great plotting, plenty of tense moments. Bloodshed. Good doses of Peeta and Haymitch, some nice tension with Gale. I finished the last page of Catching Fire definitely wanting to dig into Mockingjay and find out what had happened to Twelve.

And then – well. Mockingjay lost me a bit. I took a longer time finishing it. I can’t explain why, exactly. I desperately wanted to find out how the revolution unfolded, but where I’d shed tears (yes, I did) over Rue in the first novel, some significant characters were done away with rather perfunctorily (I am not going to say who, in case you haven’t read it). They were nicely crafted and then discarded in an instant. I know not everyone can have a lovely death scene with flowers and singing – nor should they, because this is war – but I sometimes felt cheated. Plus, I’m on Team Peeta, and he wasn’t quite the same (I mean, obviously) in this instalment.

That said, if I look at the entire trilogy, the story arc makes complete sense. The Hunger Games had that nice build-up of excitement, then what felt like a reasonable resolution before Catching Fire got you all worked up again and left you panting for the third book. So after those two, Mockingjay is a resolution of sorts. And while there are loose ends left hanging, none of them were game-changers for me. I still came away from the trilogy with a strong appreciation for Collins’s sense of story.

And I still have no trouble understanding why the eleven-year-olds fight over the copies in their class library.

Book Ten: The Hatbox Letters

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Again, not really book ten, but whatever. I’ve blogged 1/10 of my experiment!

Another Canadian pick – The Hatbox Letters, by Beth Powning. This was a bit of an odd one for me, for various reasons. It’s a slow starter, and because I’ve been sitting around all medicated with a broken ankle, it may have taken me a bit longer to get into the right frame of mind. Once I did, I couldn’t stop reading.

Powning is a wonderfully descriptive writer. The main character, Kate, is in the process of grieving the death of her husband, Tom. She rambles about their empty house, thinking about what life was like when he was alive. Then someone gives her a bunch of hatboxes from her grandmother’s attic, and she starts to go through them.

This is where I was really drawn into the story. Kate dives into her family history, starting with the death certificate of her grandfather’s sister, who passed away suddenly at the age of eight. She sifts through bills and other artefacts that were tucked away in the attic for a century, forgotten by their original recipient. At the point the story-within-a-story begins, and we start to learn more about the family from 100 years ago. I’m not altogether sure if these vignettes are meant to be Kate’s imagination, running wild as she reads the letters and uncovers long-held secrets about her grandparents, or if we really are travelling back in time with the narrator, but it doesn’t matter, because the story is compelling and beautifully told. Back in the present, we follow Kate through the first year without Tom (what Joan Didion calls the year of magical thinking), as she comes to grips with his death and reconnects with someone from her past who’s also in the throes of grief.

It all sounds very depressing, but really, it isn’t. Kate’s story is told with some beautiful imagery – of winter storms, a big rambling house, the garden she and Tom worked on together (also a symbol of her grief and recovery). In the end you know she’s going to come out the other side. The story of her grandparents is one of resiliency, and Kate’s story is, too.