Slamming Mockingjay could turn into a new cottage industry. I don’t want to be a part of that, so let me, first of all, come right out and say it: Suzanne Collins can write circles around me. I’ve loved her stuff from before the time she was famous, even. She’s got a knack for page-turning action and is a joy to read.
So…if a great writer like SC can falter, I think her little stumble is worth looking at.
I guess a lot of people would tell me she never stumbled. Mockingjay, they will assert, was the perfect end to a perfect trilogy.
Well, let’s look at some stats:1
- For Hunger Games, of the 1191 reviews at Amazon:
- 3, 2, and 1-star reviews made up 7%.
- 4-star reviews made up 18%.
- 5-star reviews made up 75%.
- For Catching Fire, of the 583 reviews up at Amazon:
- 3, 2, and 1-star reviews made up 8%.
- 4-star reviews made up 18%.
- 5-star reviews made up 74%.
- For Mockingjay, of the 482 reviews up at Amazon:
- 3, 2, and 1-star reviews made up 39%.
- 4-star reviews made up 16%.
- 5-star reviews made up 45%.
Further breakdowns:
- For Hunger Games:
- 1-star reviews=2%
- 2-star reviews=2%
- 3-star reviews=4%
- For Catching Fire:
- 1-star reviews=1%
- 2-star reviews=2%
- 3-star reviews=5%
- For Mockingjay:
- 1-star reviews=13%
- 2-star reviews=12%
- 3-star reviews=15%
For the first two books roughly 93% of Amazon reviewers gave 4 and 5-star reviews. For the last book that figure sits presently at 61%. The 4-star reviews stay roughly the same for all three books, but the 5-star reviews drop 30% in the third book from what it was in the first two books.
That percentage is too big to ignore, I think. That drop means something. It means, I think, that SC stumbled a bit with her third book.
Others interpret the stats to mean that only the ignorant readers didn’t like the third book. It got starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and PW, for pity’s sake. The silly romance readers wanted a fluffy, happy ending and just don’t appreciate meaty, real, gritty stuff. Well, they can say that all they want, but SC, I’m sure, isn’t going to say any such thing. She’s not wanting to insult her readers. If a third of them are stupid today, what were they last year and the year before that when they were singing her praises? No, SC, because she’s smart, will, I’m fairly sure, look at the reviews and try to see what she did that irked such a large segment of her fans.
Go read all the one, two, and three-star reviews at Amazon.
Really. You can learn a boatload there. Even the really bad reviews—the I-hate-Suzanne-Collins-and-hope-she-dies-of-black-lung-disease type reviews—can teach you something. Those reviews tell you that you’re not going to please all the people all the time. Some readers, no matter how careful you are, won’t be able to understand your story.
Some readers slam Collins for too much romance, others slam her for not enough. It is clear that tastes vary, and once you write a book your way, there will always be readers who are disappointed that you didn’t write it their way.
Particularly when you have two such wonderful boys in love with your heroine, you are going to disappoint some readers when you pick one over the other.
So read those reviews and then forget them. Readers who are just complaining about your choices, will always be around. The poor you will always have with you.
But I, being the youngest child of six, always tried to learn from the mistakes my older sibs made. I want to learn from the mistakes of other writers, too. So what was it about the first two books that almost everyone loved and what was it about the third book that almost a third of the people really disliked?
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- Yes, I understand that this is less than 500 people speaking, out of the hundreds of thousands, possibly million or more, who bought the book. I still think when you compare a a pool of people who commented on Amazon about the book two years ago to a pool of people who are commenting on the books at Amazon today, you can learn something. ↩
This is really interesting. I’m a big fan of statistics, and your sampling of 500 makes the numbers very compelling.
I’m just starting to read the Hunger Games, so I can’t personally speak about what worked for me (and what didn’t) throughout the trilogy, but something definitely changed in terms of the general population’s acceptance of this book. Done right, stats don’t lie.
Very interesting to look at the numbers. I agree that listening to readers can tell writers a lot, even though some times we’ll need to translate into writer terms.