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Happy Sunday everyone!

First off, Catherine over at The Writing Room kindly gifted me a blogger award which I'll post about soon!

Numero dos, I'm gearing up for Columbia's semester starting next week. Now I'll have night classes to tack on after working all day. And the hopefully going to the gym. And maybe seeing my friends sometimes. And reading a book or two. Oh yeah, and writing.

The Mockingjay Pin

Speaking of reading books, I managed to finish Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins, within six hours of buying it on its August 24th release date. This was mostly due to not wanting to have to avoid spoilers everywhere (I work with 8th graders). I promise the below review has NO SPOILERS if you haven't yet read it.

My first recommendation is to reread The Hunger Games and Catching Fire before embarking on Mockingjay. There were some little things I had to remind myself of once I had already started reading.

The end of a series is always such a bittersweet experience. I'm usually anxious to see what ends up happening to the characters I love and yet I'm sometimes not ready to see them go. When I read The Hunger Games I enjoyed every heart thumping word that came across the page. I cared instantly about Katniss and her family. Catching Fire succeeded in making me care even more deeply about the world Collins created.

I had meetings the day Mockingjay came out and as soon as they ended I zipped to my nearest bookstore and gleefully picked it up. I found the pacing to be similar to Catching Fire, by starting slower and picking up speed as it went. The story was both satisfying and not, which I thought I was appropriate for this series. If we were meant to be happy with everything that happened it would have been penned by Disney, not Collins. The book was bloody, upsetting at times and, I felt, completely necessary. It was a roller coaster ride of emotions.

In a YA world seemingly obsessed with "Team Boy A" and "Team Boy B" I was happy to find that the love triangle in the story was a background thread woven into a larger tapestry. When discussing this series, most people wouldn't start with the Peeta vs Gale debate. They want to talk about the horror of kids killing each other or about the parallels of the Capitol and our society. I think that's how it should be in this type of series. Don't get me wrong, I adore a good love story. I just never want it to come at the expense of a fantastic story.

And as far as I'm concerned, Mockingjay is a fantastic story to cap off a thought provoking series. I rarely reread books but I know I'll reread this series at some point in the future.