Five Days to Mockingjay!

In the run-up to the release of Deathly Hallows, HogwartsProfessor featured seven days of predictions about the Harry Potter series finale. That was a lot of fun, if, of course, most of the predictions didn’t play out. One kind of prediction, though, all came in as winners: the ones that said only that we’d see the story formulas that worked in the first six books of the Hogwarts Saga in the seventh installment. Sure enough, in Hallows we got the hero’s journey, the narrative misdirection, the alchemy, the Christian symbolism, everything that made the previous books what they were.

So in the few days left to us before Mockingjay is published and all the speculation about ‘what happens’ is even more obviously comic and pointless, let me spell out from Ms. Collins’ Hunger Games formulas what pretty much has to happen unless she leaves the rails entirely. [Read more…]

Six Days to Mockingjay!

We’re officially in the last week of the countdown to the publication date of Mockingjay, the finale to Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, so it’s time we do some serious thinking about President Snow. I’m pretty confident that he’s not on Team Pearl, but let’s take a long look at what he says and does before jumping to conclusions. I’m thinking that the man who smells of blood and roses may be a key to the alchemical symbolism of the series’ clincher.

Snow seems to be President-for-life. We see him in the Second Quarter Quell tape, after all, in the same role he plays in the Third (see Catching Fire, page 195), which, assuming his time in office has been uninterrupted, means he has been the face of government for more than a quarter century. To give you an idea of that time-frame, just over twenty-five years ago the real world US President was Ronald Reagan. I’m confident a lot of Hunger Games readers know about him only from books.

I have two deuterocanonical reasons for wanting to discuss the nasty man in the Capitol, beyond his longevity and his always taking the form of Peter Cushing in my imagination, albeit with lips. The first reason is Ms. Collins’ comments about him in her School Library Journal interview earlier this month: [Read more…]

7 Days Until Mockingjay! Let the HogwartsProfessor Official Countdown begin —

If you’re like me and do not surf Hunger Games fandom sites with any regularity, you are totally in the dark about Scholastic’s Mockingjay release promotion currently in full progress. It’s called “The 13 District Blog Tour” and involves 13 YA reading web sites, none of which are in the Hunger Games blog-o-sphere per se. Each site talks up its assigned District from the Games and offers a promotional give-away from the Scholastic Mother-Ship. Yesterday, the Tour reached District 7, NovelNovice.com, and tomorrow it goes to Jenn’s Bookshelves for District 8 (see schedule and links below the jump).

The front and back of the Tour are pretty obvious. The good news is that Scholastic is using its head to direct the horde of Hunger Games readers to a bunch of quality weBlogs they probably never would have found on their own. The downside? [Read more…]

Entertainment Weekly interviewed Ms. Collins last week and asked her a few questions about “the books she loves.”

What did we learn? Well, for one thing, that Katniss’ last name is a hat-tip to Thomas Hardy and the heroine of Far from the Madding Crowd (Team Gale, take heart! The original Miss Everdene returns to her first admirer in the end). [Read more…]

Earlier this month, Rick Margolis of School Library Journal sat down with Suzanne Collins to talk about the upcoming finale to her Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (The Last Battle: With ‘Mockingjay’ on its way, Suzanne Collins weighs in on Katniss and the Capitol). I thought there were four points, at least, worth exploring here in our countdown to Mockingjay’s 24 August publication date: her assertion that the books are “absolutely, first and foremost, war stories,” her hope that the books would bring us closer to a time when there would be no wars, her Katniss and Spartacus comments, and her thoughts about the symbolism of the Mockingjay. [Read more…]