Catching Fire

I wish I could give this fewer stars, because its clearly not as well put together as The Hunger Games was, which isn't a huge suprise as a middle book in a trilogy. The first two hundred pages are rather aimless and do a lot of skimming (these are the points, like in the first book, that the target audience becomes obvious) and I kind of felt like putting Katniss and Peeta back into the games was a bit of a cop-out. But nonethless I could not put this damn book down. Literally. I carried it around the house with me, even when I was not intending to read for a little bit. If I was at the computer, and a website took a couple seconds too long to load, I was tempted to crack it open and devour another page or two.

It's these characters, man. They're just so gorgeous and wonderful and messed up and how is Katniss not in a straightjacket by now? And then Collins does that awful thing with cliff-hanger chapter ends. Lady, I have to get up at six in the morning for work. Not fair. And I'm still mad about Cinna.

The fact that the challenges in the arena were often psychological (raining blood, animals that screamed like human beings) was not an accident. The Capitol was conducting psychological warfare on the Hunger Games contestants (though I'm not entirely sure how this translates into good television, even for a sicko like me), and this story is determined to pull every aching heartstring in its readers. Oddly, it fell short in its most obvious effort - I'm not swayed by Peeta. His undying teenage love for Katniss seems trivial compared to Finnick's familial bond with Mags, or Cinna's quiet, slightly dangerous passion. Call me cold, but the boy's constant pining damsel act gets a little repetitive. And I'm not necessarily more inclined to Gale, as we see so little of him, and he's so much like Katniss anyway.

It's interesting and sad to me that there is so much fixation on the supposed love triangle in this series. To me, Katniss' relationships with Gale and Peeta have a lot more to say about friendship, partnership and sacrifice within a purely platonic scope than they have anything to do with with romance. And that's not even going into her bonds with other male characters like Cinna, Finnick and even Haymitch. Catching Fire lays on the complicated with all these relationships, on what it means for Katniss to kiss Gale and share a bed with Peeta (personally, this sounds like a solid case for polyamory, but that may be just me), to appreciate the sympathy and love of people born with far more privilege than her but hate them when they break down in tears at the thought of her dying for their entertainment. There are no easy answers to anything in this book, the intention of it is to ask the questions and light the fire for the next one.

I'm not sure what else to say about this book, because you can't really read it without intending to read the series through. Its a gateway. And if you filled in the missing word after “gateway” with “drug,” good, you see where I'm going with this. This series is toxic, it gets in your veins, it changes the way you look at the world. My parents were talking about the upcoming summer Olympics the other night, and I began to feel slightly ill. I had to remind myself, “No, that's not the one where they kill people.” There's enough of our world in this story that it often feels like looking into a warped mirror, regardless of muttations or the plausibility of such a society existing. Maybe that's why I can't put it down.