This review was originally written and posted in April of 2013.

Just to recap, I named many of the unnamed characters from last book:

Cynthia = Mrs. Everdeen

Brandon = Mr. Everdeen

Nell = Foxface

Kriss = District 8 girl (died first night at her campfire)

Sara = District 4 girl (died in the wasp attack)

John = District 3 boy (played with mines)

I can’t fight the sun. I can only watch helplessly as it drags me into a day that I’ve been dreading for months.

By noon they will all be at my new house in the Victor’s Village. The reporters, the camera crews, even Effie Trinket, my old escort, will have made their way to District 12 from the Capitol.

I see we’re starting the angst extra early this book.

The problem is, the book is trying to repeat the tone of the last installment, with Katniss carrying on because she doesn’t like what’s about to happen.  But in the last one, she was about to enter the deathlotto and was worried about her sister, who was also being put in for the first time.  Here?  Here she’s about to get her make-up done.  There’s just no sense of priority or scale from this, because the book is more interested in symmetry than in sense.

I wonder if Effie will still be wearing that silly pink wig, or if she’ll be sporting some other unnatural color especially for the Victory Tour.

Pink is totally unnatural.  Scientists invented it in the 1950s.

Strategically placed almost midway between the annual Games, [the Victory Tour] is the Capitol’s way of keeping the horror fresh and immediate.

Strike me silly if you want, but I just don’t see the horror of this.  Katniss says it’s because it reminds everyone of the games, but frankly…so what?  The district people are already beaten down by their daily life and crushing poverty and terrible living conditions.  The Games were horrible because they meant two children would be taken away and killed, but this?  They’re not any worse off from it, and they get a bit of a break from the monotony of crushing work.  So they reminded you of the Games?  Who fucking cares when everyone moment of every other day is a reminder of their oppression anyway?

They can afford to buy butcher meat in town, although none of us likes it any better than fresh game. 

Why?  Why is butcher meat of a less quality than what she hunts?

And what’s with the ‘fresh’ qualifier in there.  Is butcher meat not fresh?  Do they get shipped meat that’s already been butchered, and it’s now dry or stale or canned/salted/whatevered?  Because in that case, you’re not really buying meat from a butcher.  So what’s really going on here?  Is it that fresh, quality meat isn’t available in her district, no matter how much money you have?

The animals should be coming in from District 10, and domestic animals tend to be fatter and more tender than wild animals, because they get to just sit around and have their food handed to them.  Also, they aren’t fucking squirrels, and pork is just always going to be better than squirrels.  So is it that District 10 is sending them the scrawniest, poorest quality animals? Do other districts do the same with other types of products, where the non-Capitol people just get the leftovers and oopsies?  Because that would be nice to know. Although, in that case, it should be about on par with the squirrels and rabbits she usually brings home, because she told us that larger game is a rarity.

But my best friend, Gale Hawthorne, and his family will be depending on today’s haul and I can’t let them down.

But she can’t just give them money for food, for some reason. 

Katniss says they depend on this hunting, but Gale is working in the mines.  However, if hunting does better at providing then mining, then Gale shouldn’t be mining at all.  He should eschew that job and just do full-time hunting and gathering.  If employment isn’t optional, then why the fuck are Gale’s and Katniss’s mothers allowed to do just whatever they want?  It can’t be because they’re female, because this book we meet a female who was a miner. 

Every year in school, as part of our training, my class had to tour the mines. When I was little, it was just unpleasant. The claustrophobic tunnels, foul air, suffocating darkness on all sides. But after my father and several other miners were killed in an explosion, I could barely force myself onto the elevator.

Hey, look!  Consequences from trauma!  …and it’s being used to make her afraid of tiny, suffocating mine shafts that many people are scared of anyway and which she’ll never have to face during the course of the story.  *sigh*

Twice I made myself so sick in anticipation of it that my mother kept me home because she thought I had contracted the flu.

I could see that with a normal mom, but in this case, no.  For one thing, she should know that her daughter is scared of the way that her father died.  She got upset over this every year, after all.  For another thing, no one who sees the flu on a regular occasion and has to treat it is going to confuse it with anxiety.

He stands it because it’s the way to feed his mother and two younger brothers and sister.

Except it’s not feeding them.  You’ve clearly stated that they still depend on hunting.

And here I am with buckets of money, far more than enough to feed both our families now, and he won’t take a single coin.

And so we continue with our ‘proud poor people’ caricature.  You know, it took me a while to figure out why I find this whole line so disgusting.  I think it’s because it’s trying to play off like it’s more “noble” to be independent and to work your way out of poverty, rather than get handouts.  Like, Gale may be poor, but he’s not one of those poor people.  He’s the kind of poor person with some pride who doesn’t want to be a burden on society, or whatever.  “Teach a man to fish” and all that. 

This kind of…commentary or view or whatever is going on, it completely falls apart in context, though.  This is not one poor family; this is an entire community that is being uniformly shat upon.  There is no process by which Gale can work his way out of soul-crushing poverty, there never has been, and (to their minds) there never will be.  There is no upward mobility, but there are starving children in the family.

Also, you can teach a man to fish if you want, but someone still has to give him his first fishing pole.  Direct charity is not uniformly evil.

On top of that, who the fuck cares if Gale won’t take it?  GIVE IT TO HIS MOTHER.  Gale does not get to dictate the fate of the whole family just because he happens to possess the oldest dick in the house.

Exchange my father’s old leather jacket for a fine wool coat that always seems too tight in the shoulders. Leave my soft, worn hunting boots for a pair of expensive machine-made shoes that my mother thinks are more appropriate for someone of my status.

I have no pity for you.  Buy a coat that fits, since you’ve got “buckets of money.”

And since when are machine-made shoes more expensive than hand-made shoes?  Did this author just completely miss the entire point of the Industrial Revolution?

Really, this is where the opening bit just completely falls apart.  The book is so focused on rehashing the first novel that it can’t help but sound ridiculous.  This is the part of the book where Katniss is supposed to hate her life, but her in order to do that, it has to play off like being rich is such a hardship and being poor is better, even though last book we were supposed to pity her for being poor.  Now she’s got food and clothes and nice house and lots of money, but woe because it’s not as awesome as her old clothes!

Now, it’s not terrible for Katniss to be upset with her current life, but that requires the book to actually come up with something new, not rehashing the same trends but saying that her opinion on stuff is completely opposite this time.

I mourn my old life here. We barely scraped by, but I knew where I fit in, I knew what my place was in the tightly interwoven fabric that was our life. I wish I could go back to it because, in retrospect, it seems so secure compared with now, when I am so rich and so famous and so hated by the authorities in the Capitol.

This is a bit over-dramatic, but at least it would make more sense as a focal point than telling us that her shoes hurt because she’s apparently too stupid to buy the correct size.  Honestly, I wouldn’t mind it at all if it weren’t for the part about glorifying her previous life.  She almost died just from day-to-day starvation.  You can be upset with your fame without also saying “Ya know what was great?  Living an un-heated, mice-infested hovel.  That was awesome.”

The mines weren’t an option, what with a baby to look after, but she managed to get laundry from some of the merchants in town. At fourteen, Gale, the eldest of the kids, became the main supporter of the family.
Hey, you know what fourteen-year-olds can do?  FUCKING BABYSIT. If the mines supposedly pay so well that Gale’s father can support the whole family doing it, then Hazelle can go to work there and Gale can watch the kid. 

And, hey, wait.  So Gale’s dad can support the whole family while Hazelle does no work at all, because apparently that’s how poverty works in this world.  Yet Gale, doing the same job, can’t make enough pay and has to rely on Katniss’s hunting?

The book tries to paint Hazelle in a good light, saying that Katniss respects her and all that.  But it just doesn’t hold up from a meta standpoint.  If the book wants to paint her in such a good light, then why isn’t she the one supporting her family?  Why is she being shoved to the side and given menial ‘woman’s’ work?  Plus, if you add it to the ‘noble poor person’ trope that got applied to Gale, what’s the book’s view on Hazelle and her (perfectly reasonable) willingness to accept help?

In winter her hands got so red and cracked, they bled at the slightest provocation. Still would if it wasn’t for a salve my mother concocted.

Oh, book, you try so hard, making it sound like Cynthia did an awesome thing by invention lotion.  But mostly likely Hazelle is just using animal fat, oil, and/or beeswax, and that’s not exactly a mystery.  People have been using that for dry/cracked skin for literally thousands of years. 

Unlike Gale, she has no problem with our hunting arrangement.

Seriously, why are you letting Gale call the shots then? 

it became a meeting place for illegal trades and then blossomed into a full-time black market. If it attracts a somewhat criminal element

“The illegal market that only does business against the law tends to sometimes attract law-breakers.”  Uh…duh?

Gale told me that Greasy Sae, the old woman who serves up soup, started a collection to sponsor Peeta and me during the Games. It was supposed to be just a Hob thing, but a lot of other people heard about it and chipped in.

They’ve apparently never done this for past tributes, but Katniss was just that special you guys.

He’s surly, violent, and drunk most of the time.

Help me out guys.  I might have missed something.  But when has Haymich ever been violent? He molested Effie on stage, but it wasn’t a particularly violent act, and it happened pretty much in isolation.

I’m getting the white liquor because a few weeks ago he ran out and there was none for sale and he had a withdrawal, shaking and screaming at terrifying things only he could see.

So…the book is aware that detox is a thing, and Haymich is soaked in enough booze to have this sort of reaction to a lack of alcohol…but during the games, it was just so easy for him to turn sober enough to be mentor.

I swear, it’s like all the consequences are kept in a zoo.  We can look at them, but we can’t play with them.

When they asked about my friends, everyone directed them to Gale. But it wouldn’t do, what with the romance I was playing out in the arena, to have my best friend be Gale. He was too handsome, too male, and not the least bit willing to smile and play nice for the cameras. […]So some genius made him my cousin.

Yup, we’re starting this again.  I swear, love triangles are in like 90% of books right now, and most of the time they’re shoved in just for the sake of appealing to the trend, but this book really, honestly wants to tell us that said trope wouldn’t sell well to the Capitol citizens.  But the book and Katniss seem to have both forgotten that she wasn’t in love with Peeta when she was chosen, not in real life or in their fiction.  So really, there’s no part of this entire line that makes any amount of sense.  A second lover would just up the dramatic appeal, and it wouldn’t even make Katniss look bad since she wasn’t leading Peeta on.

It’s a separate community built around a beautiful green, dotted with flowering bushes. There are twelve houses, each large enough to hold ten of the one I was raised in.

Houses fall apart pretty fast when no one takes care of them.  There’s a whole lot of stuff that goes wrong that you wouldn’t be able to catch unless you live there.  Theoretically, it’s possible that whatever groundskeeper they have is doing home repairs, too, but that’s a lot of work for something that most likely isn’t even going to get used.

Think about it.  If their District gets a new winner once every 12 years, that’s more than 100 years before the last house is filled.  By then, someone has probably had to tear down sections of it and rebuild them, because it would have been damaged by normal environmental wear-and-tear.  So why bother?

bunches of brightly colored corn affixed to the front doors as decoration for the upcoming Harvest Festival.

Why do you have a harvest festival if you have nothing to harvest?

However, Haymitch’s house, despite the care taken by the grounds-keeper, exudes an air of abandonment and neglect.

The empty ones, though, oh they’re just fine and don’t look neglected at all.

I get that the empty houses are supposed to be a sign of the capitol’s excess and waste.  Fine.  But you can display that just by having any number of giant mansions about for the winners.  Three mansions is an excess.  ONE mansion is an excess.  Twelve mansions is just stupid, except this book consistently fails to properly display the consequences of that stupidity.  Yes the capitol can be dumb and self-destructive, but don’t show me self-destructive behavior and then also claim they’ve got iron-fisted control over the country.

I fill a basin with icy cold water, dump it on his head, and spring out of the way. A guttural animal sound comes from his throat. He jumps up, kicking his chair ten feet behind him and wielding a knife. I forgot he always sleeps with one clutched in his hand.

She forgot he had a knife, but she remembered to leap out of the way before he woke up.  What?

“No, I ate at the Hob,” I say. “But thank you.” My voice doesn’t sound like my own, it’s so formal.

That counts as formal?  What’s informal?  “Fuck off, I already ate”?

He’s right, of course. The audience will be expecting the pair of lovebirds who won the Hunger Games. Not two people who can barely look each other in the eye.

Are you sure?  Because happy couples are boring.  Fighting couples make for good TV. 

I’m staring into the snakelike eyes of President Snow.

The only word we got last time on Snow was that his eyes were ‘are as unforgiving as a snake’s’ but here the book seems to be using the analogy as a physical description.  So, basically, Katniss made a poor simile last book, and now she’s decided to just continue rolling with it?  Or does he have slit pupils for some cosmetic reason?  Who knows!

And fuck you, book, snakes are awesome.

Oddly enough, this opening doesn’t bother me too much, except for the disgust at the whole “Gale is the supporter because dick” bit.  There’s a lot of set up for things I’m going to hate later, but said stuff isn’t in isolation bad yet.  Frankly, the bit with her waking up Haymich and being weird at Peeta is a pretty decent showing.  But this is the high point of the book, and it’s all going to go downhill from here.