Children’s Books - 'Mockingjay'

Survivor
By Katie Roiphe
Published:New York Times, September 12, 2010

MOCKINGJAY
By Suzanne Collins
390 pp. Scholastic Press. US$17.99. (Ages 12 and up)

What if the future were a giant reality television show in which children were pitted against each other in an elaborate fight to the death, in which politics, war and entertainment had finally become indistinguishable? This is the question raised by Suzanne Collins’s brutal and absorbing “Hunger Games” trilogy, and answered in the much anticipated final installment, “Mockingjay.”­

 The premise of the series is that a corrupt and decadent Capitol rules over 12 impoverished districts in Panem, in the ruins of North America. Every year the Capitol authorities stage a “reaping,” in which a girl and a boy from each district are chosen by lottery to be tributes in the Hunger Games. When her younger sister is picked, the heroine, Katniss Everdeen, volunteers to take her place, and with the others is styled, trained and then placed in a spectacularly designed high-tech arena, to fight in the televised games until only one contestant survives.

Though the “Hunger Games” trilogy has by now won many adult readers — there are 5.6 million copies of the series in print in the United States and Canada — it is the perfect teenage story with its exquisitely refined rage against the cruel and arbitrary power of the adult world. One might think that “Mockingjay,” in which Katniss is finally saved from the Games and delivered to the revolutionary forces to become their figurehead, would offer some redemption, but it turns out the rebels are just as morally ambiguous as Panem’s leaders. The full-scale revolution is being sold on television to the disheartened and oppressed districts, in carefully produced spots with labels like “Because you know who they are and what ­they do.”
The rest at NYT.