Mockingjay: Book and Film

 Reviewed by Meygan 

Spoiler Warning!  This review assumes you have read or seen The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.

In Mockingjay, the third book in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series, Katniss Everdeen, better known as the Girl on Fire, has destroyed the games. Never again will she or anyone else have to compete in the terrifying, horrific games created by President Snow. However, Katniss is not in the clear. Peeta, Joanna, and Annie are being held hostage by the Capital. Meanwhile, Snow uses Peeta to deliver televised messages, knowing that Katniss will be watching and plotting.  In the messages, Peeta urges Katniss not to start a revolution and says that war doesn’t help anything. Katniss is confused by Peeta’s requests. How can he ask her not to fight after everything they have been through? Katniss is asked by Plutarch and Madame President to be the Mockingjay, the living symbol of the rebellion. At first, Katniss is reluctant because she feels like she can’t. However, Katniss is motivated to take down the Capital, but nothing comes before saving Peeta. 

Mockingjay was my least favorite book in the series. The Hunger Games was fantastic, Catching Fire was pretty good, and Mockingjay was meh. I thought the beginning chapters were a snooze and I wasn’t “hooked” into finishing the book until I was halfway through the story. I liked the ending though. I wasn’t enthralled, but I certainly wasn’t displeased. One good thing is that the love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale is finally resolved! 

When it comes to books into movies, one question that comes up frequently is, “Will I understand the movie if I have not read the book?” The answer in this case is no, you do not have to have read the book first. However, I do recommend reading the books for gaining a better perspective of the characters and descriptions. 

As for the movie, Mockingjay Part 1 has received mixed reviews. The movie had a very, very slow beginning but this was to be expected since the book took a while to get to the action. I was hoping that the movie would pick up the pace and bring the action to us sooner.  I remember asking how much time was left of the movie because if anything exciting was going to happen then there wasn’t much time for it. However, the ending was fantastic. I think the movie ended in a great place for fans to pick up next year when Mockingjay Part 2 is released. The movie actually did a good job of staying on track with the book. As far as I can remember, nothing major was left out and nothing new was added.  Jennifer Lawrence did a superb job of playing Katniss, and everyone else was on top of it.

Since this movie only covers the first half of the book, movie goers will have to wait a whole year before the franchise releases Mockingjay Part 2. Personally, I would have rather Mockingjay been one movie instead of two movies divided. I could have easily picked out 30-45 minutes in Mockingjay Part 1 to cut out. That way, more action could have been provided and all the director had to do was tack on another hour and voila! The whole movie is complete. But no, my wish wasn’t granted and because of that I will have to wait another year to see the good part of Mockingjay.  

Read 'Em Before You See 'Em: Young Adult Books

The rush to turn Young Adult books into movies has not abated! Many adults are discovering that YA books can definitely be worth reading:  a good book is a good book. Here are some upcoming movies based on YA books coming to a theater near you:

·         “If I Stay” is the story of a young woman who is in a coma after an accident. She sees her life as it was, where she is now, and must make a choice: to face a very different life or to go to the light. The book (and its sequel, Where She Went) is by Gayle Forman and is a teen favorite.  The movie opens August 22.

·          “The Maze Runner” is based on the YA series by James Dasher.  Thomas awakens in a glade inside a maze, but has no memory of anything before.  He’s one of a group of boys struggling to survive and to find a way out in this futuristic movie due in theatres this September.  It joins the very popular “Hunger Games” and “Divergent” series as a big budget movie with strong teen following. It’s coming to theaters September 19.

·         Speaking of “Hunger Games,” the final book has been split into two movies.  “Mockingjay, Part I” is scheduled for release on Nov. 21.

·         “The Giver” stars Jeff Bridges in an adaptation of the award-winning book by Lois Lowry.  Jonas lives in a seeming idyllic community where everyone gets along and there is no war or suffering. Then he is singled out to be given the memories and secrets of his world from an old man known as The Giver.  The book came out in 1993 and became an instant classic. Let’s hope the movie does it justice! We’ll find out starting August 15.

·         “White Bird in a Blizzard” is based on the novel by Laura Kasischke. Sixteen year old Evie is trying to move into adulthood, struggling to escape the tightly proscribed world her parents have created.  Then her mother disappears. Shailene Woodley and Christopher Meloni star, and the opening is scheduled for September 25.

        While YA books seem to be the most prized for movies, children’s books have made their own impression.  Recent titles turned into film have included “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” “How to Train Your Dragon,” and William Joyce’s "Epic" which was based on his book The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs.   Next up will be “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” based on the book by poet Judith Viorst. Viorst wrote the book after noticing that  her youngest son, Alexander, was prone to having "bad days."  The book became a musical play, and now it's going to be a movie.   Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner star in the family comedy which opens October 10.

Pam Neal's Book Talk: Divergent

Interview by Kristin

Pam Neal is our young adult librarian extraordinaire.  Pam is known for her ability to match people, especially teens, to books.  This is the first of several blogs devoted to the popular world of young adult literature.  For the uninitiated, here’s a quick blurb on Divergent:

The world has changed.  After a catastrophic war, the surviving leaders made a decision to restructure society.  All individuals were placed into factions, societal groups which put their talents to the best use.  The Abnegation are the Selfless—they live a plain lifestyle and are also trusted to govern the entire society.  The Erudite are the Intelligent—those who seek knowledge to support the betterment of the world.  The Candor are the Honest—seeing everything in black and white, seeking openness to promote a perfect society.  The Amity are the Peaceful—working together and farming to feed the population.  The Dauntless are the Brave—the protectors of the city.  In this society all 16 year olds are given an aptitude test on a certain day of the year, and then choose their faction in a ceremony the next day.  Most stay with the faction they were born into, but some feel the call of another group.  There is a training period for all initiates and they must pass through the challenges before they are full-fledged members of their faction.  If they fail, they live factionless on the outskirts of society, a fate almost worse than death.

Abnegation-born Beatrice (Tris) is 16 years old, and it’s time for her choice of a lifetime.

Kristin:  Thank you for talking to me about Divergent.  I know Divergent is such a popular book right now and that your teen group has really liked it.

Pam:  All of my teen groups have read it.  From tweens all the way up.  That’s why when I took the kids to the movie, there were 59 of them.

Kristin:  You are a brave woman.

Pam:  Well I had other parents!  It’s good to make the comparisons between the books and the movies.  And when you take kids to the movies that have read these books, they’re going to let you know if they don’t like something.

Kristin:  What makes this one special and why is it worth reading?

Pam:  I liked it and I think my kids liked it because it’s dystopian and in this world in the future you have to live in these factions.  You have to live within that faction and you cannot go outside of that realm, or you become “Divergent”.  Divergents threaten the system because they don’t want you have to have a mind of your own.  The faction aspect made this one a lot different.  Now there was some violence, but not nearly what you had in some of the others.  So I think the concept of the factions kind of set it apart.  Of course all these  future dystopians are so negative.  I mean, it’s a negative world!

Kristin:  It seems like founders of the society were trying to set it up as a utopia, but obviously it didn’t work.

Pam:  Right, and so it’s everything just negative, negative, negative in their world.  And I liked the relationships between the kids.

Kristin:  How do you think that your teens related to the “faction before blood” thing?  Is that part of striking out and finding their own identities?

Pam:  I think they had a hard time with the factions at first.  Before all of them read the books, we took the faction quiz to see what faction they would be in.  I gave that to every one of my kids, and of course most of them would find out that they’re not clear cut in a faction, that they are divergent.  When the factions start unraveling, I think they kind of expected that.  But the concept was interesting to them because I don’t think they’d ever thought of that before.  I’d never thought of that before, “Hmmm, let’s put us into a category.”  Because I’ve never fallen into a category!  So I thought the categories were interesting.  Abnegation the selfless, Erudite the intelligent, Dauntless the brave-- Dauntless really caught their attention-- then Amity, the peaceful, which is, if you look at it, the hippies of the sixties.  And Candor, everything’s black or white.  I like the way that in the movie they dressed everybody according to their faction.

Kristin:  And that was described in the book.

Pam:  I liked the way they did that.  I thought it was neat and the kids thought it was too.

Kristin:  So obviously we don’t want to give too much away, but Beatrice, or Tris, and her brother Caleb were both born into Abnegation, and it’s pretty obvious early on that Tris is drawn to Dauntless.

Pam:  It’s really funny when kids read the books—I’m older, but I was never drawn to Dauntless.  There would be no way I would be Dauntless, absolutely none.  Watching some of these kids read it, I would see which way they were drawn to certain things.  Of course I know they painted Dauntless (so that readers would) to be drawn to Dauntless.  I was never drawn to Dauntless, but Tris is, and her brother is drawn to Erudite.  I thought it was interesting how the parents came from different factions too.  I think Four is a very interesting character.

Kristin:  And of course he’s very attractive, in print and in the movie.

Pam:  Yes, I thought the two of them together did an excellent job.

Kristin:  Once you know a little bit more about where he came from, it makes sense that they’d have that attraction to each other.

Kristin:  Will the teens read the rest of the trilogy, Insurgent and Allegiant, in book club?

Pam:  We’ll go to the movies, but this series takes a big turn.  Insurgent—very popular.  Allegiant—very controversial, especially for a young adult series.  I thought Insurgent took Divergent to another level and I enjoyed it.  Then you hit Allegiant which really hits the controversial level.  I liked Divergent better than The Hunger Games because I liked Tris’ character.  I liked Divergent also because it just keeps moving.  Mainly though, I like Tris and Four.

Kristin:  So the characters?

Pam:  I thought it was very character driven.  I was a little bit disappointed in the movie because they didn’t develop the other characters as well.  They left out Uriah, who was one of my favorite characters.  But he’ll have to be in the second movie.  I think Veronica Roth hits Tris’s growing stage.  Tris grows from this little girl, very cowardly in a way, to what she wants to be and I think she does a very good job at that.

Kristin:  Right, because she’s really been groomed to be selfless and only allowed to look in the mirror once every six months. I liked that they carried that over to the movie.

Pam:  I do too.  I liked Katniss in the Hunger Games, but Katniss, to me, she was always right there, always fearless.

Kristin:  She was more of a born leader and was already going out there to provide for her family so it wasn’t as much of a change.

Pam:  But for Tris there was a huge change.  And I think that the kids like that.  I think it’s one of the very few books that I’ve done with all the groups.  It never ceases to amaze me: 43, 44 years I’ve been a librarian with teenagers, boy if they don’t like something, they don’t like it, and they tell you.

Kristin:  It’s good that you’ve got them talking to you.  What other series would you recommend?

Pam:  The Giver by Lois Lowry.  The Giver set the stage for a lot of these dystopians.  It won the Newbery prize.  I did The Giver with kids, and I did A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle because that sets the stage for a lot of these dystopians also.  See, the kids today don’t realize that The Hunger Games was not the first dystopian.  You had Brave New World and you had 1984.  You had quite a few.

Kristin:  It’s all new to them, it’s their generation.

Pam:  The movie I’m interested to see next is The Fault in our Stars by John Green.  Oh, I love that book.  So I’ve decided to alter my whole summer to have a John Green summer.  Except for my tweens—they want to do Neal Shusterman’s Unwind.  Unwind is phenomenal.  And you talk about bringing up a lot of questions!  I just loved The Fault in our Stars.

Kristin:  That should be a good movie though.  I think the writing was very good.

Pam:  Being a librarian for as long as I have, that’s probably one of the best books I’ve read for kids.  I’m glad young adult literature is huge now.  It’s at its peak because lots of adults are reading it.

Kristin:  It is appealing because they tend to be shorter, and they get to the point faster.

Pam:  And they are building good characters that you can identify with.  So it’s really good.  Legend by Marie Lu is another series. The books are Legend, Prodigy, and Champion.  Those characters are good.  Another good one is The Maze Runner by James Dashner.  I did that with my tweens.  The Maze Runner is a modern day Lord of the Flies.  It is excellent—it’ll grab you.

Kristin:  Thank you for talking to me today—it’s always enjoyable to hear you talk about books.

Nevermore: Hunger Games, Elizabeth & Hazel, Calico Joe, Miss Julia & more!

Every seat around the table was filled at the Nevermore Book Club last Tuesday and the discussion lively as the Club took on topics ranging from the Pulitzer Prize to DNA that provides a plot twist in the best seller Defending Jacob. (Yes, Gone with the Wind was mentioned again!)

This year the Pulitzer Prize Board refused to award a Pulitzer for fiction.  A couple of us thought the possibility of a tie in the vote from the Pulitzer jury may have given the Board which makes the final Pulitzer choices reluctance to award a prize to just one author. Others felt the three choices put forth by the Pulitzer jury did not appeal to a large audience. The three-person Pulitzer selection jury read more than 300 books from which they chose The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, Swamplandia by Karen Russell, and Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Several club members had read one or more of the selected books. No one seemed overly enthusiastic with the choices. (The fiction selection committee has since revealed they were unanimous in their choices of the books nominated for the Prize in fiction which does away with our tie theory!)

Mr. Barry read from an article published by Meg Wolitzer that raises questions about women authors’ works being considered “woman’s fiction” and  being relegated to the second shelf while male authors who do “serious” fiction are top shelf. (See the link to the article http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/books/review/on-the-rules-of-literary-fiction-for-men-and-women.html?_r=1) The discussion that followed was pointed and clear: how important is the gender of the writer to most people? Most of us are interested a good story or a well-done book without regard to gender. When you look at the books that have truly become part of the public consciousness over the last few years, women authors such as J. K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, E. L. James, and a host of other women writers have dominated the field.

Books being read by Club members include:

Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock by David Margolick tells the story of the 1957 desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The names Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery may not be well known, but the image of them from September 1957 surely is: an African-American high school girl, dressed in white, walking stoically in front of Little Rock Central High School, and a white girl standing directly behind her, face twisted in hate, screaming racial epithets. This famous photograph captures the full anguish of desegregation—in Little Rock and throughout the South—and an epic moment in the civil rights movement. Our reader said the book tells a very painful story about the women and bond they share even today, but it also gives a look at what was really happening at the time. She said, “Everyone had a hand in this pie.” 

Miss Julia to the Rescue by Ann B. Ross is another adventure with the intrepid Miss Julia as she rescues her favorite private detective from a deadly situation in West Virginia. Ross’ Miss Julia is what we call in the South a “hoot.”  Ever so proper, determined to help her loved ones, and egged on by her own nosiness and need to meddle in other lives, Miss Julia jumps right in with hilarity and sweet resolve. Our reader says Miss Julia makes him laugh out loud.

Calico Joe by John Grisham is a baseball story and a story of fathers and sons. Our reader says it is beautifully written and totally different from Grisham’s legal novels, but it does show baseball as “brutality disguised as sport.”

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins has another reader enthralled. One of the hottest book series in the world and a blockbuster movie, these books are highly popular with both young adult and adult readers. Several members of the group have read all three books and loved them!

Lois Lowry wrote an earlier dystopian YA series which began with the Newbery Award winning book The Giver.  The book is set in the year 2078, where everything is peaceful.  People are assigned their roles in life and young Jonas has been assigned the role of Receiver of Memories.  As he begins his training, he begins to find that his world may not be quite as he has been told.  Gathering Blue is the second book in the series, and our reader had progressed to the third and final book, Messenger.  This is a series that should be read in order.

Based on the recommendations of another member one reader is immersed in Defending Jacob by William Landay. His take is that the novel is not only an excellent mystery, but also a study in relationships between parents and children, and husbands and wives. He thinks the ending brings about a new definition of parenthood. Defending Jacob is highly recommended by three members of the Club!

The Shoemaker’s Wife by Adriana Trigiani is Mr. Barry’s book of the week. Spurred by Ms. Trigiani’s visit last week for National Library Week, he is finding the book a relaxing, easy, enjoyable read.