Hogwarts Professor

From Hogwarts Professor Louise Freeman in Virginia:

The assembly of the Council of Victors to vote on whether or not to punish the Capitol with a final (yeah, right!) Hunger Games is a pivotal scene of Mockingjay.  The obvious question we are supposed to ask is “Why did Katniss vote yes?” Was she still so bitter over Prim’s death and convinced that the Capitol was responsible that she would go along with the act of vengeance?  Or did she instantly have an “Animal Farm” style realization that Coin was no different than Snow and give the Yes vote as her best chance to kill her?  I have my own idea, but I can see how there would be differing opinions.  It might be more beneficial to ask two other questions:  1) Why did Coin call for the vote?  2) Why did the other Victors vote the way they did? [Read more…]

From Hogwarts Professor Louise Freeman in Virginia:

In case anyone’s forgotten, the New York Times gave Hunger Games a “Notable children’s book”  award. Two years and two sequels later, we have Mockingjay, which I speculate will be deemed ineligible in that category. As Elizabeth put it, we have “the biggest body count since Gettysburg,” not to mention Finnick’s description of his sex slavery, brutal slaying of young children and descriptions of battles, killings, war crimes and torture that make even adults cringe, not all of which were committed by the Bad Guys.  Can readers who were put off by Harry’s brief uses of Unforgivable curses stomach this?  Especially in a series welcomed by teens and even pre-teens in midnight release celebrations?  [Read more…]

The Hunger Games trilogy is published by Scholastic Books which company, of course, is the publisher of the American editions of Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. When Suzanne Collins was asked recently about her favorite books, she listed a few books her readers would have expected, a few that were real surprises (the influence of which titles was more obvious in Mockingjay), and not a single Harry Potter novel.

I think it’s fair to assume, nonetheless, that she has read the best selling novels of our time and that the imaginative experience she had inside the Hogwarts Saga and especially Deathly Hallows shaped specific turns in Hunger Games. The Shared Text of our times will be evident in most everything for at least a decade or two. Here are a few of the more obvious echoes in Mockingjay: [Read more…]

From Hogwarts Professor Louise Freeman in Virginia, thoughts on ‘Mockingjay,’ media, books, and truth, not to mention a contrast with Harry Potter:

“Beauty is truth and truth, beauty–that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”  John Keats.

The Hunger Games trilogy gave us the harshest skewering of the media since Rita Skeeter, and with much less comic relief.  The first two books show the broadcast Games, “reality” TV twisted into a weapon of oppression and packaged as entertainment. Mockingjay shift gears into “informational” broadcasts twisted into weapons of war; they don’t even bother calling them “news broadcasts” but “propos,” a nickname for propaganda. In the end, there’s little difference between the two formats. [Read more…]