03-30-2012, 12:45 PM | #61 | |
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Put [ SPOILER ] (without the spaces) before the text and [ /SPOILER ] after the text to hide any details that people who haven't read the book yet wouldn't want to see... Spoiler:
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03-30-2012, 03:28 PM | #62 |
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Done. My bad.
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03-30-2012, 03:35 PM | #63 |
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04-09-2012, 10:01 PM | #64 |
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................
Last edited by The Terminator; 04-10-2012 at 12:14 AM. |
04-10-2012, 08:13 AM | #65 | |
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I liked the ambiguity and awkwardness at the end of the first book and didn't need to see it resolved one way or the other. Yeah, it could have ended there for me. I felt the second book was just a desperate rehash of the same ideas, with the supporting characters less well developed and a bit of a deus ex machina at the end to quickly sort things out and lead into the next phase of the trilogy. The third book had a welcome change in tone, and felt much darker, but left me with the feeling that Collins was hacked off with the whole thing by then and just wanted to be rid of it. It reminded me of when Douglas Adams got fed up of Fenchurch and the whole Hitchhiker's series in Mostly Harmless. Mockingjay feels quite bleak, and the ending, from the descent of the silver parachutes onwards, feels rushed. Maybe I'm being too picky, but I don't think it's fair to just dump that on the reader suddenly and dash through without exploring the impact more thoughtfully. Spoiler:
My general problem with the whole series is that it felt derivative, and I kept being reminded of other books and stories: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Matrix (Hovercrafts, 13 and the whole idea of being inserted into the games and lifted out again), 1984 (especially the Hanging Tree stuff in Mockingjay - just kept thinking "Under the spreading chestnut tree...") Last edited by ndixon; 04-10-2012 at 08:25 AM. |
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04-10-2012, 08:20 AM | #66 | |
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Spoiler:
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04-10-2012, 08:55 AM | #67 | |
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Completely agree with your other points - your alternative ending would have been better - I thought it was heading that way for a while anyway, disappointing that it didn't. On the unlikeables, no I didn't care either. My money was on Haymitch, which shows how wrong you can be. Last edited by ndixon; 04-10-2012 at 08:59 AM. |
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04-10-2012, 12:34 PM | #68 |
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I think the holes in the story are kind of the point of the third book. In the first two books Katniss is the center of the story. In the third book, still told from her perspective, she is important, but there is no longer a central character of the events that are occurring in the world. In other words the third book is to a large degree about the disorientation that she is constantly bombarded with. I.e., the fog of war as no one really fully understands what is happening during war.
Spoiler:
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04-10-2012, 11:35 PM | #69 |
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____________________________
Last edited by The Terminator; 04-13-2012 at 12:10 PM. |
04-11-2012, 11:11 AM | #70 | |
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Having set a baseline of a certain style of book in the first two which for many people were addictively successful, the final book just was a massive anti-climax. The first two books combined an entertaining action read with a backstory of a world ready for a revolution. They led the reader to wondering how in the third book the author was going to take these characters and bring them together with a tiger by the tail of "changing the world". She wrote herself into a corner with that - if you spend two books putting great emphasis on how iconic these characters have become to some people and sacrifices others made in the cause of change, the third had no choice but to see it through with some sort of epic "overthrow of the empire". What transpired instead was a giant cop-out. Perhaps she couldn't figure out how to write the characters into such an ending (which is quite understandable given where the characters began from). Instead we end up with something that for 2/3rds is just repetitive dullness, with all the plot that would move the story forward relegated to "here's what happened while you were away" type of snippets. I see some people think the 3rd book is quite "cleverly" about the mental reaction to what the characters went through. However as I said above it is completely out of pace and style with the first two books - you open it expecting a continuation of what has come before and instead get something that looks like it was written by a different author. It just felt like a mish-mash of a book, as someone else said above perhaps deadlines got in the way. There were a few silly dead-ends in there like this... Spoiler:
which hint that perhaps she had other ideas in mind but they didn't make the final cut.
As I said on another thread somewhere about the movie, Hollywood are going to have to be very creative to spin this out into four movies. You are not going to have an entertaining movie if the grand revolution consists of people wandering into a number of conversations and telling what happened after the event now, are you? Who knows, maybe they will actually do a better job than the author did... or not. |
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04-11-2012, 11:46 AM | #71 | |
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That part in spoiler tags gets a little more clarity in book 2. |
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04-17-2012, 05:25 PM | #72 |
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I finished the first two and am 70% done the third, I have to say that they are the best books I've read this year.
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04-19-2012, 07:31 AM | #73 |
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04-19-2012, 01:19 PM | #74 |
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I recently read this trilogy. I see why it gets compared to Battle Royale but it should not be. Once you get past 'kids fighting kids in a dystopian future' they are completely different.
BR did not delve into the reasons for government behavior (kept it relatively faceless), had less serious interaction between characters, and did nothing like the coming-of-age stuff we get from HG. There was nothing at all in BR like the social dithering and which-boy-do-I-love we got from Katniss. The first HG book was quite good, to me. The plotting was spot-on. You know, the 'how is she going to get out of this situation' and 'what happens next' stuff. The second book was ho-hum. The third book was atrocious, a train wreck, and I only finished it because I was invested in the series by then. |
04-19-2012, 02:31 PM | #75 |
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I disagree. In the beginning of Battle Royale they talk quite a bit about the government using this as a means of control over the population. Once on the island its more about the entire group rather than just 3 characters, even though Battle Royale is about 3 characters as well
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