Zoe > Recent Status Updates

Catered to me as fuck unfortunately. Fully first-person AND flashbacks??? It’s so Person of Interest I could cry.

‘The adults rescued the kids but who rescues the adults?’

The irony of the man-hunt smoke to flush out Ralph being the thing that saves them all is extremely staggering.

Suzanne Collins said that this book was a big influence on her and I can definitely see that. This was kind of a great one to read after THG.

I have so many thoughts that I don’t think I could even attempt to write them all down.

Maybe this was just me but I think the perception of LotF is like “how could these young schoolboys do this to each other?” when really the whole point of the book is that these young schoolboys literally represent human nature and mirror REAL ADULT thinking and behavior.

I had a lot to say before Simon died but here is what I will say now: Ralph is civility, Piggy is intelligence, Simon is rationality, and Jack is something primal. And violent.

NOOOOOOO

Me googling “can epileptics hallucinate?”

“Other people could stand up and speak to an assembly, apparently, without that dreadful feeling of the pressure of personality; could say what they would as though they were speaking to only one person.”

“Simon felt a perilous necessity to speak; but to speak in assembly was a terrible thing to him. ‘Maybe there is a beast. I don’t know. But… What I mean is… maybe it’s only us. We could be sort of…’ Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.”

I like Simon.

“Passions beat about Simon on the mountaintop with awful wings.”

This is my first ‘girls would never do that to each other in this situation’ moment.

Ralph sucks.

Also bring back tables of contents.

She didn’t get to go home for Christmas :(

I like how she keeps going back up to floor forty to regroup, instead of facing one floor after the other after the other, as this is what I too would do if I were a scared princess who keeps killing monsters more by circumstantial luck rather than strength or skill or even smarts.

And who am I now that I can’t hunt and that I have every luxury? At least my mother and prim will be comfortable. But prim could still get reaped again and I will have to become a mentor and prepare other kids for their deaths. And so on.

In this book it’s like okay immediately I am under no illusions that I’m being used by the rebellion just like I was used by the capitol. What does that mean/do I do? Etc etc

Like. Everything that happens and every decision she makes, she thinks about, internalizes, and accepts what the consequences of each will be.

Okay, I won the games by pretending to be madly in love with Peeta. Now I will have to marry him and live in district 12. Which means I can’t be with gale and I probably can’t go hunting with him. But hunting is so much of who I am….

What I absolutely love about these books though is 1) Katniss is so independent that, in my interpretation of the books, the potential romance aspect of those boys is literally an afterthought to her. She feels tied to them in other real, tangible, nonromantic ways. 2) Things aren’t just happening to her and she’s just reacting to them, like it’s kind of portrayed in the movies

And don’t even get me started on my complicated feelings about the children.

In this book I really wish we had developed Katniss’s relationships with everyone more than we did. It was all very plot focused and in her head. As opposed to having scenes of her conversing with the other characters and giving more depth and nuance to each connection.

Okay it’s hard to end any series, let alone one with this magnitude. I understand the ending and the epilogue, but I wish we would’ve gone about it a different way. The offscreen trial, the re-formation of the government, the exit of every character without a proper goodbye. It reads more like trying to tie up loose ends rather than providing closure.

It’s interesting because reading the first one I was like “huh this isn’t as political as I thought it would be. I bet it gets more so in the later books” and well here we are.

6/5 and I don’t play about my all-timers

“Hard to admit, but he was something of a looker.” Katniss please 😭😭

She is the most realistic, nuanced, complex protagonist in all of modern literature, I swear.

I could’ve done without the brother crushing on her older self thing..

Wish there was more growth instead of just realizing at the end that she was putting everything on her past self and not taking accountability. But I love how well this book represents that everyone’s relationship with themselves is complicated and sometimes frustrating and at times regretful.

I hope my mom would also recognize me if I time traveled in my 30s against my will to visit my 18-year-old self

Omg AWiT and Vonnegut mentioned ‼️‼️

I was actually able to overlook this because 1) I’ve realized that fiction doesn’t have to be realistic if I’m having fun and 2) I had rose-colored glasses on as a kid and I now I dont. I don’t have a problem believing that in scary, stressful, and apocalyptic situations, people would become selfish and distrustful and violent. Cause I feel like I’ve seen it to a lesser degree and this is dialed up to 11.

Interestingly, it seems like the reason a lot of people are giving it one-star reviews is the same reason why I hated lord of the flies, which this book is inspired by, when I read it back in school: “what? How did it get violent so quickly? This is so unrealistic. Those kids would never start killing each other so fast.”

Was still good though. A fun and scary story about a fake disaster gaining national media attention and psychological think-pieces. I liked the interconnectedness of the characters stories and I particularly liked the commentary from the people who weren’t in the park—the historian, the prosecutor, etc because it gave insight to how the whole thing was perceived by the public

The reporter conducting interviews was a such a mediocre reporter, too. Like, make him bad or make him incredible and then his character might actually be compelling. Instead of crafting a more thought-provoking narrative, he spends too much time and energy providing justification for potential plotholes (why most of the people aren’t in jail, why people weren’t raping or eating each other, why help never came)