Once in a blue moon, I’ve seen my mother try something similar, but not often. If your heart fails in District 12, it’s unlikely your family could get you to my mother in time, anyway. So her usual patients are burned or wounded or ill.

So, yeah, no.  CPR is a crude, barely effective method that’s done by passers-by for a reason.  It’s just a stop-gap thing to keep your blood pumping until a doctor can get in and fix the root problem.  If a doctor gets to someone who needs CPR, she’s going to do something else, because CPR sucks.  It doesn’t solve anything.  It’s just a method for manually keeping the body functioning.  What Cynthia should be doing is teaching other people how to do CPR, not saying “yeah, bring them in here and maybe I’ll give it a shot.”

And seeing as she’s more of an herbalist than an actual doctor, she shouldn’t be doing CPR anyway, because she’s got no way to fix what’s wrong.

Also, wtf with ‘her usual patients are wounded or ill.’  What does Katniss think causes heart failure?  Unicorn farts?

Sometimes a person’s heart will restart, but we’re talking a fraction of percentage point of a chance. 

His lashes flutter open and his eyes meet mine. “Careful,” he says weakly. “There’s a force field up ahead.”

And of course, the few times it does work, it’s not FUCKING MAGIC.

If you’re injured enough for your heart to stop, then you are fucking injured.

Peeta’s heart didn’t just spontaneously stop beating in his chest.  It got electrocuted.  That causes damage.  Damage that is not fixed with CPR, no matter how attractive the giver happens to be.  Even if he does restart, he’s not going to be functioning.  We’re talking the level of alive where you need a feeding tube and constant supervision to make sure you kick the bucket again.

See, that’s not really a bad thing.  If he was in a hospital and being kept alive that way, then while he’s on all these machines, his body is busy at work repairing the damage done to him.  So the doctors would be keeping him alive artificially until his body could recover to the point of taking over such functions itself.  He can get better.  But he can’t get better immediately unless Finnick is clapping really hard and believing in fairies.

I mean, for one thing, if you’re doing CPR right then it’s going crack ribs.  Think about it.  The rib’s purpose is to keep things from hitting the heart, so if you’re going to restart the heart by hitting it, you have to break through that natural defense.

“It’s okay. It’s just her hormones,” says Finnick. “From the baby.”

Fucking hell?  No, it’s seeing someone she cares about FUCKING DIE. 

SERIOUSLY, SHE’S ALLOWED TO HAVE EMOTIONS AFTER SEEING SOMEONE FUCKING DIE.

I know she doesn’t usually, but that means that this is a step in the right direction, not that she’s a hormonal bag of hormones.

And no, this is not a small point.  This is actually a really big problem in our society.  Do you know how many people are happy to completely dismiss a woman’s feelings and concerns because she’s “just hormonal”?

How many times has this played out:

A woman in a workplace objects to being treated as a secretary, and the men around her laugh and say she must be on her period.

A woman undergoes a lot of stress due to a deadline/evaluation/major project/asshole boss who dismisses everything she says as “lol, period.”  She comes home stress and angry and short-tempered, and instead of figuring out why she’s upset, her significant other shrugs, ignores her, and says “lol, women be so weird, there’s no point even trying to figure them out.”

A woman works her ass off trying to get promoted, then gets passed over because “women are too emotional/hormonal/irrational.”

A woman gets sexually assaulted and people dismiss it because “she’s just hormonal and blowing things out of proportion, she’s probably on her period.”

The ‘hormonal’ excuse is used all the time to dismiss and ignore women, claiming that anything they say is “just so confusing.”  You can see it in jokes about how women are so hard to understand, when really, we’re not.  We’re people.  We’re no harder to understand than men, just for some reason people don’t want to put forth the effort to link cause and effect when it comes to women.

They’re perfectly happy to realize that men respond to stress by getting cranky, but when a woman is under stress and acts cranky, “Woah!  Where did that come from?  I’m so confused!  Instead of figuring out why she’s acting like that and addressing the root cause, I’ll just call her inscrutable, pretend like she’s making shit up, and completely dismiss/ignore her.”

Women have hormones.  We have emotions.  We do not have delusions where we see problems that aren’t there.  Our emotions make us react to stuff that actually exists, JUST LIKE GUYS DO.

But back to the point, this book is perfectly fine to have Katniss witness someone she cares about FUCKING DIE and come back to life, then has everyone act so confused about why she would be upset about that!  Surely she can’t be reacting to something that happened.  I mean, she’s a girl and girls always do things because of hormones and not logic, right?

This book is feminist, and don’t you forget it.

“No. It’s not —” I get out, but I’m cut off by an even more hysterical round of sobbing that seems only to confirm what Finnick said about the baby.

I fucking hate you so much, book.

But I am also furious because it means that I will never stop owing Finnick Odair. Ever.

FFS, this again?  The book just has some sort of weird fetish for putting Katniss id debt to people.

Peeta showing up in the arena wearing a mockingjay is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it should give a boost to the rebels in the district. On the other, it’s hard to imagine President Snow will overlook it, and that makes the job of keeping Peeta alive harder.

So.  Imagine this.  You’re in District Eight.  The rebellion has just been brutally put down with the liberal use of machine guns, and also a factory was blown up because the government is full of idiots.  Now you’re working triple shifts and 20 hour work days to cover all the work that the dead people aren’t doing, you’re doing this on a starvation diet, and you haven’t seen anyone in your family for weeks because they’re put to work rebuilding the factory that didn’t need to get exploded in the first place.  But there’s talk of another rebellion.  You figure, hey, dead can’t by any worse than this, so you try and make plans, but it’s hard when you don’t even have enough brainpower to keep the bobinspinners from chopping your fingers off.  You’re exhausted, you can’t function, and for all you think that death would be better than this, you’re still terrified of death and trying to weigh the pros and cons of a new rebellion. 

And then you see that Peeta has a shiny necklace.

Do you actually give a flying fuck?

No, of course you don’t, because that shiny bobble has literally jack shit to do with you and will not help your situation at all.  Neither will the person wearing it.  And since the Capitol will think it’s just going along with high fashion, it’s not like anyone with power will see it and be swayed to helping your case.  There is no benefit in any way to be derived from Peeta wearing one particular shiny bobble over another.

Still, I’m glad Finnick keeps playing the pregnancy card for me, because from a sponsor’s point of view, I’m not handling things all that well.

SO.  MUCH.  HATE.

And if they know I have it, they might do something to alter the force field so I can’t see the aberration anymore. So I lie.

If they knew how to stop the discolored bubble from being there, they’d just stop it from being there in the first place.  It’s a flaw, after all.

On the other hand, this thing has a high chance of killing one of your allies.

But sure.  Go ahead.  Lie to them and withhold vital information, thereby upping the chances that one of them will croak.

I mean, everyone else has been jumping on the lying train this book.  Why should you miss out?

Perfect. Now all the attention will turn to the surgeons who fixed my deaf ear after the Games last year, and they’ll have to explain why I can hear like a bat.

Yay, throwing the people that helped you under a bus!  They fixed your hearing; you siced the despotic government on them.  Seems fair.

despite his protestations, I think all Peeta really wants to do is lie down.

Maybe he’s just moving slowly because he’s a shambling type of zombie.

What?  It makes more sense than “Finnick fixed heart damage by repeatedly punching the heart.”

I go forward, wondering about Finnick, who saved old Mags but will let her eat strange nuts.

Yes, how strange it is that he allows Mags to act like an independent adult female, capable of making her own judgments and decisions.  Doesn’t he know that, as her assigned male, it’s his job to keep her in line?

There’s the Cornucopia, the sea, and then the jungle all around. Very exact. Very symmetrical. And not very large,”

I’m thinking you don’t know what a sea is.

I instinctively feel the Capitol might want these unpopular Games over as soon as possible.

“Instinct: a largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason”

Seriously, guys, I cannot tell you how much I hate this use of the word ‘instinct.’  It is by definition taking intelligence and action away from the character.

On top of just plain old not making sense.  What’s up there, Katniss, did your DNA tell you that the Capitol doesn’t like you?

I count the shots, each representing one dead victor. Eight. Not as many as last year. But it seems like more since I know most of their names.

You only bothered to learn 14 of their names.  14 out of 22 is technically more than half, but that’s stretching the definition and not even close to what most people would call ‘most.’

Especially since it’s not like it’s hard to learn 22 names.

a possum clinging on the branches close to the trunk. […] As I’m gutting and skinning it,

I see Katniss has learned nothing from her previous experiences and continues to let all of the water in that animal drain out into the ground, even while she’s complaining about being dehydrated.

Its muzzle is wet. Like an animal that’s been drinking from a stream.

Two things: it was in a tree when she shot it, and it’s perfectly possible to have water collect in a hollow or on leaves or whatever and drink from there.  Katniss never checks the fucking tree.

Also, since this Narrator Katniss narrating in bullshit land, we can go ahead and assume it really did have a pond or something.  This is never mentioned again.  They never find it or anything like it.  They get their spile, and then that’s all they ever use.  So what was the possum drinking?

He ought to be cooked… .”

Technically, with a kill that fresh, as long as you don’t roll him around in his own shit you can go ahead and eat him.  The reason you’re supposed to cook meat is because it spoils pretty fast, and cooking it will kill off anything that’s started to grow on it.  (Also, industrial butchering is…not exactly antiseptic.)

I can’t pretend I knew any of them well. But I’m thinking of those three kids hanging on to Cecelia when they took her away. Seeder’s kindness to me at our meeting. Even the thought of the glazed-eyed morphling painting my cheeks with yellow flowers gives me a pang.

She remembers the two males for things that they actually did.

She remembers Cecelia for having kids.

This book is feminist, and don’t you forget it.

Haymitch will be working with the District 4 mentors. He had a hand in choosing this gift. That means it’s valuable. Lifesaving, even.

You know this…because of Haymich.

What, do you assume the D4 mentors send stuff that’s unhelpful?

“To make syrup,” says Peeta. “But there must be something else inside these trees.”

…Why do you assume that there’s something besides sap in the trees?  Because you didn’t find any springs or streams?  Well, that’s actually not uncommon.  They’re called rainforests for a reason.

But they have declared it to be so, therefore of course they are right and when they tap a tree with t heir spile, actual water comes out.

Apparently these are fake, hollow trees with indoor plumbing stuffed inside them.