But the apples must have set off enough mines, causing debris to activate the others.

If all it takes is debris from a mine to set off the others, then why couldn’t she throw rocks until she hit one?  Then she wouldn’t have wasted three more arrows.

For that matter, the mines are sensitive enough and powerful enough to do this, but in that case they should be going off all the time.  The girl last chapter who set one off by dropping a ball, why didn’t bits of “debris” land near her neighboring tributes and set their mines off as well?  And then on and on in a domino effect?  Do the gamemakers just have someone with really quick reflexes on hand to disable the rest in case that happens?

I’m dizzy. Not the slightly wobbly kind, but the kind that sends the trees swooping around you and causes the earth to move in waves under your feet.

Which in turn forces her to crawl slowly.  Finally, book, you’re getting closer to an actual obstacle created by an injury.  It would have been nice if she’d been similarly disabled by thirst, hunger, smoky lungs, burns, etc, but I guess better late than never.

But I can’t let my fear show. Absolutely, positively, I am live on every screen in Panem.

And…???  I’m still not convinced that being stoic is so vitally important to her survival, book, so you really need to dig deep and give me a better reason than this.  Telling me that TV audiences don’t like to see scared people is stupid, as I can bring up an entire horror genre and half the action-adventure drama as a counter-point.

I’m glad my hiding place makes it impossible for the cameras to get a close shot of me because I’m biting my nails like there’s no tomorrow.

Much like in a previous chapter where she ran to her room and cried on her bed, this really isn’t the best image to be presenting.  It doesn’t make her look like she’s in fear for her life, it just makes her look silly.

The boy from District 3 has done his job too well.

Huh, I wonder if John had a plan to destroy those supplies and run off, but he never had a chance to get it done because he was always being watched?  Because otherwise, there’s really no reason for him to set things up so the pile could be destroyed.

I mean, really think about it.  These were landmines, not firebombs, and yet the pile caught fire.  For the record, explosions don’t include fire unless you specifically craft them to include fire.  That’s why movie explosions are done with gasoline, not just TNT.  Real bombs kill by way of a shock wave, but most foodstuffs aren’t as delicate as the human body.  They can be smacked and squished by pressure and still be edible.  So, with explosions going off all around the pile, the pile should just be knocked over.  Maybe the containers would be broken, but the stuff in side not necessarily destroyed.  To get to the level of destruction described here, John would have basically had to try to destroy the pile.  Set bombs and fuel right next to/under the pile. 

Man, I want to know John’s story, now.  I bet he had a great plan before Katniss came in and got him killed.

It’s that quick. The death of the boy from District 3.

Not that Katniss will ever think of it that way, that her actions got him killed.  Nope, he’s just a nondescript footnote.

They retire to the far side of the lake to allow the Gamemakers to retrieve the body of the boy from District 3.

The thing with the body retrieval and the way everyone just goes along with it is really strange.  It’s just an assumed thing.  It’s just assumed that the capitol will want these bodies back, and it’s just assumed that this is the right thing to do, because all the tributes go along with it.  It’s not even “the capitol will hit you with knockout gas if you don’t move away” or anything, people just naturally go along with it.  And it’s not because there’s a taboo against raiding dead bodies, because Katniss’s only issue about raiding Glimmer’s body is that the pus was icky.

I can see Cato and the girl from District 2 put on their night-vision glasses. The boy from District 1 ignites a tree branch for a torch

And then immediately after, Cato and Clove scream in pain and smack Marvel upside the head.

Book, really.  NVGs work by enhancing the light in the environment.  They’re designed to take a trace amount of star light and brighten it until you can see everything, so if you stick a torch in there, it’ll enhance that as well until it’s like looking at the sun.  I’ve used them before, and I can tell you that when you’ve got them on and look at a bright light, it’s enough to sear your eyeballs. 

The Careers stride back into the woods to hunt.

Their insistence on hunting at night and yet never in the daytime, with a torch no less, continues to confuse me.  Trained, hah.  These kids wouldn’t be able to function if the fail!writing didn’t prop up their idiocy.

Let the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games begin, Cato, I think. Let them begin for real.

16 kids are dead, but now that we’re down to the 8 that the book actually cares about, now it’s “real.”  All that previous stuff, all those other kids that died?  Yeah, fuck em.  Katniss doesn’t care and neither does the author.  And really, that’s pretty sick, declaring all the pain and horror those kids went through to be “not real.”

Since roosting overnight in a tree isn’t sensible anyway, I scoop out a hollow under the bushes and cover myself with leaves and pine needles. I’m still freezing.

???  This is how people have kept warm for ages.  Mast is actually a fairly good insulator.  Stop your incessant whining, City Kid.

I begin to have more sympathy for the girl from District 8 that lit the fire that first night.

It’s a start that will never finish, sadly enough.  Poor Kriss.

When I open my eyes, the world looks slightly fractured, and it takes a minute to realize that the sun must be well up and the glasses fragmenting my vision.

…so these are NVGs that work by…um…fracturing…what?

Still doesn’t negate my earlier point about the NVGs + torch.  Even if bright light doesn’t cause, it very clearly does cause the glasses to be useless.

No, it’s Foxface, standing in the rubble of the pyramid and laughing.

So, Nell’s been living off these supplies so far and throughout the games has shown her biggest strength to be in copying other people.  She can’t hunt on her own, and none of the other kids have stores of food large enough that she can steal them without a fight.  The loss of this pile of food means the loss of her food.

But she’s still happy. 

Because with the Careers’ stores eliminated, she might actually stand a chance. Just like the rest of us. 

Yeah, no.  She was eating that food.  With it, her chances go down.  I’m not sure which character I should blame for being stupid here, so I’m just going to call it a general failing of the book.

There’s something about that sly grin that makes me sure that befriending Foxface would ultimately get me a knife in the back.

…???  She’s been entirely non-violent thus far, but grinning makes you think she’s going to up and start murdering?

And why is this until-now-very clever girl just standing around in the middle of an open field and grinning?

I shoot two fish, easy pickings in this slow-moving stream, and go ahead and eat one raw even though I’ve just had the groosling.

Yes, tell us more about how in this world where food is scarce and storing it is tricky, it’s just so strange that you decided to eat meat when you have it.

Despite the groosling and the fish, my stomach’s growling, and I know I’m going to have what we call a hollow day back in District 12. That’s a day where no matter what you put in your belly, it’s never enough.

For some reason, she thinks she needs this as an excuse to eat the rest of her nuts and berries and fish.  Katniss, you do not need to explain to us that you’re not a pig for eating food when you’re starving and uncertain.

By late afternoon, I’ve resolved to go looking for her.

By this point, they’re about 24 hours past the rendezvous time, and all Katniss has done so far is sit around in a tree and try and convince us that she’s not a fat, greedy slob.  For all the book goes on about the need to keep things interesting, it sure doesn’t have a problem with letting Katniss just sit for hours and hours at a go.  I mean, heaven forbid we follow her as she actually does stuff and figures out problems.

It’s a relief to be doing something after sitting around all afternoon.

Which is especially odd after lines like this.  If Katniss doesn’t like sitting around all afternoon, then why did she sit around all afternoon?

Rue has been singing to them, and recently.

Which just begs the question of what Rue was up to before now.  If she was fine right up until the point that Katniss runs into her now, then why didn’t she make it back?  What was keeping her out all night?  She can travel by tree-top; don’t tell me she was cornered by the careers. 

Anyway, so, Katniss lollygags around eating nuts all day instead of finding Rue, thereby giving Marvel plenty of time to net the poor girl and stab her.  Good thing you weren’t in a hurry, Katniss, or you might have been able to prevent the frigding. 

But we’ll get more on that bit of rage-inducing misogyny next chapter, as we get to watch Katniss linger over the perfect victim dying the perfect, mess-less death.