Catching Fire: 04/22/16

Now I'm posting a review of a book that's been reviewed to death. The whole series has been reviewed to death. Yes, I'm behind the times in reading the series. I did actually buy them as they came out but I was busy reading other things. My natural response to extremely popular things is to wait until they aren't so extremely popular. So if you've read the series once or multiple times, feel free to skip this one and come back tomorrow. I won't mind.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins is the sequel to The Hunger Games. Katniss is discovering that being a winner of the games is more dangerous than the games. Now as the newest celebrities, Katniss and Peeta have every moment of their lives tracked, recorded, and planned by the government, all in the name of entertainment.

The first book jumped immediately into the big bad games. Katniss volunteers, trains, travels, primps, and then spends the majority of the book trying to stay alive in the games. Although it's obvious from the get go that she'll be back in the games this time, the pacing is entirely different. If anything, the games are an afterthought.

Instead most of the time is spent on press junkets. Katniss and Peetra go back and forth across the country at the beck and call of President Snow. These trips give Katniss (and thus, us) a chance to see the rest of the country to get a sense of where everything is and what's going on.

Now anyone on the booklr end of Tumblr knows that President Snow ends up being a BFD, especially in the film adaptations. He's also a popular "man you love to hate" type villain. But if you stop to think about where he is in the timeline of his authoritarian country, you know he can't possibly wield the sort of power he apparently has. Which in turn, makes Mocking Jay's course of events fairly predictable too if you know anything about the rise and fall of dictatorships.

In all this, what has my attention? Ah, that would be the mysterious District 13. It, we've been told, was wiped off the map after it rebelled. What if it wasn't? Sure, that's a common trope in this genre. Think of the world outside of the enclosed cities of Logan's Run, for example.

I will be reading the final book to see if things continue to play by the expected tropes.

Four stars

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