Catching Fire

The movies are coming out, so it's time to finish the rest of the trilogy. The second book in the trilogy is less trilling, and focused on the aftermath after Katniss completed the first Games. The "chick-flick-edness" of this series becomes apparent, as our heroine faces her guilt, fear, and shame after surviving the tournament and facing the results of returning home. The plot developments serve as background events, while Katniss' crying and romantic entanglements takes center stage.

My beef with this series holds true from the last book: while Katniss Everdeen is a 'strong' character in the sense that she can kill stuff with arrows, her emotional weakness and self-centeredness becomes really tiresome. She's an unreliable narrator in the most unsatisfying sense: she fails to perceive the effects of her actions and the meaning of others', but she never creates an interesting or exciting alternate story for us to follow as a reader.

Noted on November 30, 2011