Mockingjay

What's inside (11 sections)

1. Rules below ground
2. Bargaining for the role
3. Shooting the propos
4. Peeta on television
5. Peeta comes home
6. Pods and mutts
7. The double bomb
8. The executions and home
9. What does not hold
10. Key takeaways
11. FAQ

I read Mockingjay in one long night and then sat with it for a few days, unsure whether I had been given an ending or a verdict. Collins published it in 2010, and it is the least comfortable of the three books: the Games are over, the war is on, and the heroine is now a slogan with a bow. What follows is the whole plot, twists and the ending included. I will also argue about what the book costs.

Rules below ground

The book opens in the ruins of District 12. Katniss walks through the ash of her own house in the Victor's Village, collects Prim's cat Buttercup, and finds a single fresh white rose left for her, which means Snow knows exactly where she goes. Then a hovercraft takes her to District 13, the district the Capitol has been insisting for seventy five years was destroyed in the Dark Days. It was not destroyed. It made a bargain, went underground, and spent three quarters of a century building a second country under the first.

Life there is a schedule. Every morning each citizen puts a forearm into a machine that tattoos the day's timetable in purple ink, and the ink rinses off at bath time. Meals are measured by age, height and job, there are never seconds, and waste of any kind is treated as a minor crime. There are blackouts, air raid drills, curfews, identical gray clothing, no alcohol of any kind, which forces Haymitch into a supervised detox in seclusion, and a half hour of reflection before dinner as the only free time in the day. Katniss ignores her tattooed schedule and hides in closets and air ducts, which is as close to rebellion as anyone gets.

President Alma Coin runs it. She is quiet, gray haired, pale, and impossible to read, and she never wastes a word. When Katniss finds her own prep team locked in a cell, thin and bruised for stealing bread, and demands their release, Coin complies without emotion and everyone understands the message underneath: obey the rules, whoever you are. It is the first sign that the new regime has old reflexes.

Then Peeta appears on a Capitol broadcast, thin and controlled, telling Caesar Flickerman that the war is suicide and that the districts should lay down their weapons. Katniss watches him still trying to keep her alive from inside a prison, and decides there and then that she will be the Mockingjay, because it is the only move left that does anything for him.

Bargaining for the role

Prim is the one who tells Katniss that she is in a position to make demands: Coin wants a symbol, so the symbol gets to set a price. Katniss writes her list. Buttercup the cat stays, with an eight inch window, a curfew, and a guard ordered to shoot him if he causes trouble. She and Gale hunt above ground two hours a day, inside a quarter mile, on tracker anklets, with the meat handed to the kitchen. Gale stays at her side. On camera she keeps the Peeta romance, so Gale is presented as family. Every tribute still in Capitol hands, Peeta, Johanna, Enobaria and Finnick's Annie, receives a full public pardon if the rebels win, and the immunity can be revoked if Katniss fails to perform. The last line she adds is the one she wants most: I kill Snow.

Coin accepts all of it and replies, about the execution, that they will flip for it. Then she announces the deal to the whole Collective, and the crowd in District 13 boos, because these people wanted Peeta tried and Katniss has just pardoned him in front of them. The arrangement is clear from the first day: the Mockingjay is worth a great deal to the rebellion, and worth nothing the moment she stops being useful.

Shooting the propos

The propaganda work begins badly. Cinna is dead, but his sketchbook survives, and his designs for the Mockingjay uniform are built by a team under Plutarch and his assistant Fulvia. In the studio Katniss freezes, reads her lines like a hostage, and the footage is unusable. Haymitch watches one take and says it will kill the revolution. The diagnosis is simple: she convinces only when nobody is directing her.

So they put her in real danger and film it. In District 8 she walks through a field hospital as the Capitol bombs it, refuses to stay hidden, fires Beetee's explosive arrows at the hovercraft overhead, and then speaks to the camera over the rubble, promising that the Capitol will do the same to the rest of the country if the districts surrender. Beetee hijacks the Capitol's own airwaves to broadcast it. Later, in the ruins of her district, she sings her father's song, The Hanging Tree, while the crew films a demonstration of Gale and Beetee's new trap, a bomb that waits and then waits again. The song goes round the country and becomes a marching tune.

The other front is District 2 and the armory inside the mountain the rebels call the Nut. Gale's plan is to seal every exit with avalanches until the garrison surrenders, and Katniss realizes halfway through that he has not planned for anyone inside to come out alive. One exit is left open under armed guard. Then, filming in a square full of surrendering Capitol soldiers, Katniss holds out her hand and begs them to stop fighting, and is shot on live television.

Peeta on television

While she works, the Capitol works on her. Peeta is brought out again and again for interviews, each one worse than the last. In the first he repeats the case for a cease fire. In the next he asks Katniss, on air, whether she really trusts the people giving her orders, and nobody in District 13 will discuss it with her. In the third he yells that the district will be dead by morning, and guards beat him on camera for it. The warning is real. Coin puts 13 into the bunkers, and Katniss spends days underground with her mother, Prim and Buttercup, listening to bombs shake the ceiling above them.

Finnick explains the logic while they wait: Snow keeps the people his enemies love close, because a captive is worth more than a corpse. To buy time for a rescue mission, Katniss films an interview about how she met Peeta, and Finnick tells the country on live television what Snow did to him as a boy, selling victors to the Capitol elite and taking their secrets as payment, and how he poisoned his way to the presidency. The rescue team, Gale and Boggs among them, goes in during a blackout and comes back with Peeta, Johanna and Annie.

Peeta comes home

Katniss runs to him and he runs to her, and his hands close around her throat. He has to be knocked unconscious, and she wakes in a neck brace unable to speak. Plutarch and Beetee explain what has been done to him: hijacking, which pairs tracker jacker venom with repeated images of Katniss until her face is filed under terror. There is no known reversal. Locked in a cell, delirious, Peeta calls her a killer and a liar and a mutt, and blames her for the fire that killed his family.

The recovery is slow and it happens mostly off the page. Haymitch brings in Delly, a friend from home, to see whether ordinary memories reach him. A therapist rebuilds Katniss's face out of clay for him, piece by piece, until he can hold the shape of her in his hands without panicking. Katniss keeps her distance because proximity seems to hurt him, and she throws herself into the war instead. When he is far enough back to ask, he asks one question over and over, real or not real, and she answers him plainly. When Coin sends the now unstable Peeta to join her squad in the Capitol, Boggs tells her plainly what she already suspects: the President would quite like the Mockingjay to die in the line of duty.

Pods and mutts

The squad is Star Squad 451, led by Boggs, with Gale, Finnick, a camera crew, and Peeta in a vest and restraints. Their job is to film the advance, not to fight it. The Capitol streets are rigged with pods, timed traps with poetic names, and the map of them in the Holo is weeks out of date. A pod takes out members of the squad and then takes Boggs, who hands the Holo to Katniss before he dies. She tells no one that she has stopped filming and started walking toward Snow's mansion to do the job herself.

Underground the pods thin out and the mutts begin: engineered lizards that corner the squad in the tunnels and tear people apart. Finnick holds the rear so the others can run, and when the creatures are on him, Katniss uses the Holo's detonator to bring the tunnel down on him quickly rather than let them finish him slowly. It is the cruellest death in the series and it takes four lines. The survivors come up into the ruined streets and are taken in by Tigris, Snow's own cousin, who hates her district's government enough to feed rebel soldiers in her cellar.

The double bomb

At the edge of Snow's mansion the Capitol's last refugees are pressed against a Peacekeeper cordon, and among them are children, used as a shield. A hovercraft drops canisters marked as humanitarian aid. They explode, and the crowd and the medics who run to help are hit a second time when the delayed bombs go off. Prim, who has been trained as a medic and has no business being in this war at all, is among the people who run in. Katniss takes the second blast in the back, is burned across most of her body, and goes unconscious with her sister's name in her mouth.

She wakes days later with her face and back rebuilt, a white rose on the table beside her, and the war already over. The Capitol has fallen, Snow is in a cell, and Coin is president of what is left.

The executions and home

Snow is dying, coughing blood into a handkerchief, and he tells her the truth at the worst possible moment. He was about to surrender when those canisters came down, the bombs were not his, and the double blast, one explosion to wound and a second to kill the rescuers, was Coin's idea of a master move. Katniss remembers the demonstration she sang over in District 12, Gale and Beetee waiting for the second blast, and she does not say out loud that she believes him.

Coin gathers the surviving victors and proposes a final Hunger Games, with children from the Capitol as tributes, to balance vengeance against loss of life. Peeta, Annie and Beetee vote no. Johanna and Enobaria vote yes. Katniss votes yes for Prim, which is either revenge or a test, and Haymitch votes with the Mockingjay. Coin says excellent, and the vote tells Katniss everything she needs to know: nothing has changed, only changed hands.

At the execution she is to put one arrow through Snow in front of the cameras. She turns, instead, and puts it through Coin. Snow collapses laughing, choking on his own blood, while the guards take Katniss down. She reaches for the nightlock capsule in her sleeve and Peeta's hand gets there first. She is tried, defended by Plutarch and declared not sane by a doctor, and sent home to District 12 under a kind of house arrest, with Haymitch next door and Greasy Sae to cook for her.

District 12 is a scattered survivors' camp in a ruined town. Her mother goes to District 4 to run a hospital, Gale takes work in District 2 and sends a note that he cannot come back to the place where her sister died, and Buttercup comes home fat and old looking for Prim. Peeta plants primroses by her door. Between them, Katniss and Peeta build a memory book of everyone they have lost, and slowly, in fits and relocations and long silences, they come back to each other.

The epilogue is twenty years on. The arenas have been destroyed and turned into memorials, the Games are gone, and Katniss and Peeta have a boy and a girl who play in the meadow and learn about their parents at school as if it were history. She still has nightmares and always will. To manage them she keeps a private game, a list of every good act she has ever seen a person do, recited when the mornings are bad. It is repetitive, it takes years to grow, and the last line of the trilogy is her judgment on it: there are much worse games to play.

What does not hold

The war is the least convincing part of the book, because we mostly hear about it. Large stretches of the middle run on the same loop: a briefing, a filming, a trap, a casualty list, another briefing. The propos are well described as a problem and then become a problem for the reader, since Katniss standing in a studio being bad at lines is not dramatically different from Katniss standing in a briefing being silent. When the book is specific, in the hospital in District 8 or the tunnels under the Capitol, it is excellent. When it is summarizing the state of the country, it reads like a dispatch with a first person pronoun attached.

Peeta is the real casualty of the structure. He is the engine of the first two books and here he is offstage for long stretches, hijacked into a plot device, rehabilitated largely in summary, and then attached to the squad so that he can be frightening and then comforting on schedule. The love triangle that held three hundred pages previously barely gets a scene, and the boy who talked his way out of two arenas has almost no dialogue of his own after the rescue. His recovery deserved chapters and got paragraphs.

Coin is a pale mirror of Snow, and the book keeps showing us the reflection instead of letting her act. We are told she is cold by her face, warned by her treatment of the prep team, caught by her flat answers, and then surprised when she turns out to be Snow with a different haircut. The final twist works because of the vote, which is genuinely chilling, but it works about a hundred pages after the book has already told us the answer. Collins is usually so good at letting institutions reveal themselves through small cruelties that Coin's bigger cruelty arriving on cue feels like a cheat.

FAQ

What does Katniss demand before she will be the Mockingjay?

She asks that her family keep Buttercup the cat, that she and Gale be allowed to hunt above ground, that Gale work at her side, that Peeta, Johanna, Enobaria and Annie receive full pardons if the rebels win, and that she be the one to kill President Snow.

Why does Peeta try to strangle Katniss after the rescue?

The Capitol has been torturing him with tracker jacker venom in a process called hijacking, pairing the venom with images of Katniss so that his memories of her become memories of terror. He is rescued still believing she is a monster, and his recovery is slow and incomplete.

Who kills President Coin, and why?

Katniss does. After Snow tells her that Coin's forces dropped the double bombs that killed Prim, Katniss sees Coin propose a final Hunger Games for Capitol children and enjoy the vote, and she puts an arrow into Coin at Snow's execution instead of into Snow.