Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Novel Review: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins


            Honestly?

            I can’t think of a better word. Honestly?

            Well, after the first installment of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, I thought it couldn’t get much worse. Apparently I was wrong. And the trilogy’s second book, Catching Fire, proved to me how wrong I was indeed.

            I can’t number the things that annoyed me, or I would. So I’ll just list the main offenders.

            The first is Katniss’s attitude. Once again, we find our “heroine” in such a state of should-I-shouldn’t-I that it’s annoying. One minute she’s fine with this or that, the next she’s flying off the handle and making a mess, not only of herself, but for others like Peeta. (By the way, he hasn’t improved either. He’s still as annoyingly lovelorn and without resolve that I could puke.) Even her family can’t calm Katniss’s mood swings, and the flapjack quality about her gets real old, real fast.

            The second thing that annoyed me most is the fact that Katniss got put in the games AGAIN. What, that’s the best Collins could come up with for the start of the rebellion? Put another round of Hunger Games in? No secret, clandestine meetings underground while trying to funnel new tributes of the Capitol? No dodging spies on the different streets of the Districts while slipping from one border to another on apparently super-fast hovercraft? The best she could come up with is that? The originality level just bulleted down into the earth so far, I think China just had an earthquake.

            While Haymitch remained somewhat a likeable character, the others were either stereotypical, predictable, annoying, or just . . . poorly written. Cookie cutters. (Again, I think of Peeta and Gale and have to roll my eyes. How typical can you get for male characters, anyway? How flat! How boring! How . . . ugh.) The same goes for the plot. Must I redirect you to my previous paragraph? I couldn’t help but just wish for the book to be over. I thought the rebellion would be SO much more intense, so much more interesting. Instead?
 
            Eh.

            One thing I’ve noted about the entire story, though, is that there’s this element of hopelessness that not even the faintest glimmer of light will penetrate. Darkness hangs about the entire series, a pall of death and defeat that will never be overturned. And don’t even argue to bother that in our world things are the same, because I have news for you: THEY’RE NOT. There is a hope that could have been installed into this series that would have given Katniss such an undying determination to live instead of the annoying, flim-flam notion of “Do I live for Peeta or die for Peeta?”

            One person: Jesus Christ.

            Without Him, we have nothing. He is hope, and only His love can penetrate any darkness created by the world. Panem is so desolate and . . . doomed. There is nothing there. No “philosophy” to read into, no “parallel to our own society,” no live-and-die love story, NOTHING. This series is doom and gloom and death and gore. And terrible writing.

            I know that the love of Jesus will never be present in these books, but maybe there’s something—some element like pure, true, selfless love—that will bring at least a glimmer of light to this series in the last book. I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. We’ll have to see.

            Catching Fire gets One flipped page out of Ten.

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