Ah, Mockingjay.

I’ll admit, I was shell-shocked when I finished. I went to Nathan Bransford’s forum looking for people who had read the book, who could console me. I then spent several hours on the Amazon reviews, and on blog reviews.

Wow! What a load of grief this book has caused people.

There are those who loved it. Yes. There are those who think it ended exactly as it should have.

But what I find most interesting is that so many readers are saying things like, “I’m grieving,” and “I went to bed and lay there numb.” They are acting as if someone they loved has died.

::::::::::::::::::Major Spoilers Follow.::::::::::::::::::::

Only the characters that readers loved have not died. They can’t die. They must live on, the grief and guilt from their war crimes weighing on them in a way that the torture never could do. They live on, irrevocably changed. Miserable. Without hope of redemption. It’s a fate worse than death.

And it makes me stop and ask myself, “Who owns the characters?”

We don’t write by committee. The author can do with her characters as she pleases.

But the readers make friends with the characters. We want to be delighted in the characters. We want to be proud of them. If the characters sin, we want them to sin in ways we can forgive. We don’t want our friends to betray us. We don’t want them to let us down.

Well…maybe I can’t say that. Maybe some readers like the One Few Over the Cuckoo’s Nest type stories, where the evil people win. But writers need to be consistent with their characters. You can’t give us characters who act a certain way for two books and then become different people in the third book.

And it’s too bad. The book wasn’t horrible. But it had enough problems that it should have been delayed, I think.

An editor, Dave Long from Bethany House, once explained on his blog about the pressure best selling writers are under. When JK Rowling missed putting a book out one year, a lot of people lost their jobs at the publishing house and the printers, I guess. It apparently takes a lot of people to print and distribute several million books and when there was no book to print and distribute, people suffered.

And yet, Mockingjay should have been delayed. Because in a very real sense the characters do belong to the fans. The writer makes a contract with the reader at the beginning of the story. I think Collins broke her contract.

I’ll write my review tomorrow. If I have the energy.

I was so looking forward to raving. It takes so much more energy to write about a book you didn’t love and to explain why.

Meh. Maybe I don’t don’t need to write a review. Others have done that already.

Here’s one I did more agreeing with than disagreeing:

the fact that the Capitol fell while Katniss was in the hospital is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. It’s such a fatal dramatic error that I actually had to read that chapter twice to realize that’s what happened. The whole trilogy had been preparing us for a showdown between Katniss and Snow.

Collins can write whatever book she wants. She can make all the statements against war that she wants to make. That’s her right.

And as I said over on Nathan Bransford’s forum, once Katniss kills the unarmed civilian you lose the possibility of a happy ending. She has turned into one of those soldiers–the American soldiers, who torture and kill innocents and who are never right in the head again. Once that woman was killed we couldn’t have a victory and a party and all go home happy. So, instead of “freedom is worth fighting for” we got, “war is hell” and Collins has a right to tell us that (though we already got that message in Gregor). She even has a right to give a nihilistic, “Shit happens and then you die” message, if she wants.

But this last book was problematic because the characters didn’t act as much as they were acted upon. That was a huge departure from the first two books. In the first two books, Katniss was smart. She was thinking. She was planning. In this book she did very little. Peeta did very little. Gale did very little. Nobody really did much of anything, except die. Lots of people died. They died metaphorically and physically. If they weren’t blown up or decapitated by mutts, they were dead emotionally and mentally and intellectually. Katniss was numb clear through.

In this book, Prim was one of the few who lived (until she died, of course). One of the few who was more than cardboard. She was smarter than Katniss. Prim comforted Katniss and gave her answers several times. It was a very odd reversal for these two characters. And, come to think of it, Prim was kind of carboard—just showing up when answers were needed.

There were also quite a few problems with the world building.

So maybe instead of a review I’ll look at the book over the next few Wednesdays to see if I can learn some stuff about writing.

Or…maybe I’ll just move on.

For now, I’ll just say that the book is not a one star book. The reviewers who are giving it one star are just venting. But I don’t think it’s a five star book, either. Even if you liked the story, you have to admit the telling of it was flawed in a more than one area.

But I will pick up the next Suzanne Collins book right away. Anyone who makes readers love the story and the characters so much that they have to grieve when the ending disappoints, or they seek out support groups, as I kind of did, is worth studying, at least. Not to mention the fact that everything she writes is a page-turner.cking through it.

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