Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Wee Little Spoiler included. I truly enjoyed the first book in this trilogy. It was an exciting, fast-paced, five-star thriller that introduced a compelling world and an intriguing heroine. This writer is clearly capable of delivering a winner. Why, then, did she sink so low with Mockingjay? The book is confusing, oddly-paced, and littered with gratuitous violence and about as much character development as a block of wood. (Book 2, by the way, had problems--but they weren't as significant as the problems in Mockingjay.) Gale wins the prize for the most boring male lead in YA fiction. Does anyone even have a sense of his personality, other than he is strong and likes to hunt? Peeta is a bit better developed, but not by much. Throughout the book, characters are introduced, only to be quickly killed off. Not that one would care a wit about any of them. Much of the book is told in rambling summaries, and the author commits the sin of "telling rather than showing" on page after page, leaving me more enraged with every chapter. Had this been her first effort, I imagine it would have been soundly trounced by any reviewer. It is only because she published the first bestseller that this slapped-together nonsense was allowed to go to print. Half the time I was reading I felt lost and disoriented, and had to force myself to keep turning pages in the wan hope that somehow the author would pull the book out of the mire. The most odious part of the book for me was the almost complete disconnect from the characters, especially Katniss herself--who doesn't grow or change in any meaningful way. From heroes to evil villains, they were all cardboard cutouts without any depth, or even interesting personality traits that would make them memorable and compelling--the kind of characters that linger with you long after a book is closed. Snow and his odiferous white roses weren't scary, they were laughable. Coin was about as well-developed as a stump. All those annoying Romans and other citizens may as well have been named "extra 1" and "cannon fodder 2" for all that I cared. I sort of rooted for Finnick for a while (maybe he'd be a dark horse love interest? Peeta and Gale sure weren't doing it for me) but then, oops, his head gets torn off. Yucky! In short, this book was a big disappointment. Collins can do better. Her Gregor the Overlander books were charming, and I remember even feeling sad when a big cockroach in one of them gets killed. That she could get me to weep for a cockroach and then write characters like in Mockingjay...too bad.