Goal
6/12 booksRead 12 books by Dec 31, 2023. You were 6 books away from reaching your goals!
A very strong albeit more traditional entry in the fantasy genre. Pacing is only slow when the world-building gets lengthy.
I quite liked how many times we're allowed inside Coriolanus's head in the third person perspective; Collins has a gift in how she writes for these young frantic minds. Still, I am quite whelmed, as this entry in the Hunger Games universe relies heavily on callbacks to the original trilogy and adds little of note to the world of Panem. There's nothing overly challenging or surprising in offer here.
This felt like a blog post that was forced into a book. The first couple chapters were good, but after that it got repetitive without expanding on its topics and themes at all.
This is Monty Python's version of the apocalypse and Revelation. If that sounds good to you, then you'll definitely enjoy it. The ending also ties in some ideas about how we as humanity think about the end of our world and how we don't, and I appreciated that reminder as an anything-but-subtle moral of the story in a novel where subtlety is nowhere to be found.
The only critique I have is more preference-based and it's the wild structure. I found it difficult to feel like I could set aside the novel because of its strange “chapter” breaks that are inconsistent in length. It does help the flow when I'm reading, but it drastically hurts my head when trying to reach a good stopping point.