In an interview posted Friday, Ms. Collins said  in answer to the question “How do you typically plot or plan your book?” that:

It helps me to work out key structural points before I begin a story: the inciting incident, act breaks, mid-story reversal, crisis, climax, those sorts of things. I know a lot of what fills in the spaces between them as well, but I leave some uncharted room for the characters to develop, and, if a door opens along the way and I’m intrigued by where it leads, I’ll definitely go through it.

I remember thinking five or six times while reading Mockingjay that I was really surprised that she went through that door. I found myself thinking about the experience of reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix the first time and how different it seemed than the first four books of the series. Did anyone  out there ask yourself if you’d picked up a book by a different author at points in this series finale? Could anything in Games or Fire prepared us for the climax of violence in the Capitol (I’m thinking of street scenes like chapter 24, p. 341)?

Ah, poor Gale! He is the hero of District 12 and of Katniss’ family for rescuing as many residents of the Seam as he did from the fire bombing, but the experience of seeing his community destroyed and Peeta being hijacked seems to have taken him around the twist. Gale winds up designing weapons and explosives that are as bad because taken from the same twisted playbook as the Capitol. Katniss’ final decision for Peeta rather than Gale because she did not need “Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred” seemed about right. We knew that Gale raged against the Capitol, but, if you were like me, you didn’t seem him embracing war crimes as in burying people alive needlessly or creating sequentially fused bombs to take out rescue workers to defeat his enemies.

Was that too big a jump for the man of the Seam or about right? Does it capture, in contrast with Peeta’s PTSD agonies, another side of how war changes those who fight them?

We learn from Finnick, I believe, the secrets of President Coriolanus Snow, to include why his breath smells like blood, namely, “mouth sores that will never heal” (chapter 12, p. 172). Supposedly, the roses he wears are to cover the smell of blood on his breath. As these sores are a consequence of poisons, the roses take on another meaning, I think, one we see again and again in Mockingjay.

Snow uses roses to unsettle Katniss; he thinks correctly that she will think of him when she sees or smells a rose and that this will drive home his determination to find and kill her. Hence the rose in the Victor House, the roses dropped with the bunker busters on District 13, and the rose breath of the lizard mutt-tations.

I think, though, beneath the narrative line ‘roses over blood’ is an image Ms. Collins wants us to take away as a symbol of how wars are packaged and presented as public goods rather than tragic necessities. Seeing how the tributes, citizens, and survivors of District 12 are transformed from victims to victors capable (if living) of voting for a Capitol-children Hunger Games production.

Your thoughts?

I will have to return to the subject of Miss Everdeen’s “speaking truth to power” as well as her choice to play the Mockingjay part (as well as several other roles, from comic book super-powered heroine to foot soldier and special forces squad leader) but this morning I wanted to put up an open thread for your first impressions of the 17 year old leader of the Panem rebellion.

The big question, of course, is what causes her to shoot an arrow into President Coin? She ended her first Hunger Games with an arrow that was a mercy killing and she destroyed the Quell arena with an arrow to end her second trip; was the assassination of the new Panem President both of those things or just revenge for the death of Prim?

I made ten public predictions for Mockingjay in addition to the “Three Sure Things” above and I would be remiss if I didn’t go back and grade my prognostication abilities. The ten points were: [Read more…]