** spoiler alert ** Warning: Spoilers below.

I'm going to let this review stand for the whole series, and especially for this book and Catching Fire. Overall, I think the series did not really improve as it went on. I liked Hunger Games best and Mockingjay least. Was it just because of the dystopian nature of it all? Perhaps. Maybe I just found Katniss got more annoying and self-absorbed as the story went on and with her as the narrator that affected the whole experience.

If I were to sum up, I would say that this series is "1984" for the Millennials. As in Orwell's book, we have an anti-hero who faces an overwhelming oppressor that he/she can never really escape. I would also say that the Harry Potter parallels are quite striking. In both we have a reluctant teen hero plucked from obscurity to fame even as he/she doubts their own worthiness. They face an evil and implacable foe that seems insurmountable and while there are adults who help and hinder they are never as effective as the teen-hero and their same-age compatriots. In the course of fighting the foe, nearly everything they love and hold dear is destroyed, including homes and even some friends. Even the ending is the same: Years later the hero contemplating their own children and their future while suffering the effects of their own past.

I'm sure that wan't an intentional design on Collins' part, but it does make me wonder what the popularity of Harry Potter and Hunger Games among teens and young adults says about this generation. Is there a hopelessness? A loneliness of one against the world? Like 1984 there is an inevitability of misery, a sense that oblivion is the ultimate end, because the tender love and mercy of God is unimagined and completely absent.

I have seen elsewhere criticism of the lack of God in the books. I don't think Collins is suggesting that this is for the better. Actually, the trilogy doesn't lack references to religion.

In Catching Fire, there is a moment where Katniss describes a very old painting that includes depictions of "babies with wings", i.e. cherubim. I think in the books Collins is making a deliberate allusion to what can happen in a world stripped of faith and religion, of an absolute moral order. In such a world, one can imagine a government and a people going along with gladiatorial combat among children as entertainment. Even in the Soviet Union, you still had vestiges of religious understanding and context, and look at what they were able to do.

Later, in the Mockingjay, when Betee and Gale discuss the tactic of dual terrorist bombings designed to cause collateral damage to emergency first responders (which ends up being a key turning point), Katniss is repulsed and says something to effect that some things should just be out of bounds for the good guys and gets confused stares in response. In the end, it's just this ambiguity, where she can't even figure out which side was so depraved as to end up using this tactic after all, that drives her over the edge.

Again, I think Collins is making the point that what separates the good guys from the bad isn't just which oppressor is in power at the moment, but that there should be an objective moral order by which we should measure ourselves and our actions. Absent such a moral order, we are capable of anything.

I guess what I find most lacking is that Collins never explicitly connects the dots. Instead there's some superficial satisfaction in an act of revenge, some catatonic "closure", and then life goes on with a refusal to seek ultimate good. I think it was an opportunity lost for both the characters and the trilogy as a whole.