Due to the revolution in the districts preventing a proper reaping, Mockingjay does not have a proper Hunger Games arena with tributes. With Plutarch Heavensbee, the former Capitol chief Gamesmaker, calling the shots about the production values of how the war is going to be packaged and presented to Panem viewers, the series finale has repeated Hunger Games elements. Finnick and Katniss simultaneously joke that the Capitol defense pods are just Hunger Games death race items turned to urban warfare usage (see chapter 18, p. 251) and the ubiquity of film crews in every combat situation delivers the message that war is not so much about about achieving political goals with force as it is an opportunity to film a ‘propo’ video with high production values to sway teevee watchers.

Were you struck by the television wars between District 13 and the Capitol? Beetee (Volts) and Plutarch’s studio and live action film crews seemed to be the real warriors of District 13 because they were the ones responsible for the teevee message that was crafted from any fighting. And, as the rebels’ cause is shown in the end to be not much different than the Capitol’s — both seem to be about power and control — their shared dependence and acceptance of the teevee medium as essential for political victory seemed another slam on the television industry. Your thoughts?

I laid out an involved theory about how the Mockingjay Rebellion was set-up by Haymitch and companythat I called the Pearl Plot. Mockingjay didn’t tell us very much about the pin, whether Katniss Everdeen was chosen deliberately by the revolutionaries, or how the organization of the rebellion worked under District 13 direction. Ms. Collins left these details to our imagination while making it very clear that the technocrats living in their sterile underground bunkers in District 13 were definitely in charge.

Were you disappointed or relieved that there wasn’t more explanation or back-story for the mysteries set-up in the first two books of the trilogy?

I predicted last week that Mockingjay would deliver three things without fail unless Ms. Collins decided to leave the rails entirely for the series finale. Those three things were:

1. We get the same 27 chapter, 3 part book structure in Mockingjay that we’ve read in Games and Fire.
2. Not only that, we also get the same basic story sequence of Katniss going to the Capitol and enduring a deadly maze. They defeat the arena they’re put in and Katniss leaves the Capitol.   And –
3. Following character story arcs, Katniss will become the playwright of the Mockingjay rebellion script to “speak truth to power,” both the rebellion leaders and the Capitol President, and she will put her life at risk, not to mention the rebellion, in order to save Peeta. Peeta will do what Christ figures do in stories of this kind.

Pulling out the score-card,  number one was right, number two was correct in essentials, and number three had a big hit and a big miss. The “truth to power” arrow-to-Coin and death of Snow confirmed the last but, except for Haymitch’s complaints, it seems that Katniss would have let the shattered Peeta remain broken, bitter, and forgotten.

And Christ figure? He does die and rise from the mental and spiritual death he experiences in Capitol torture, offer himself sacrificially for death (repeatedly), and ultimately work for Katniss’ redemption and life as a mother.

How did you score this? Three of three? Two out of three?

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?