The first book of a trilogy benefits from presenting a world that is brand new to the reader. A brand new landscape can give your plot wings that it might not otherwise have, or at least distract from the fact that you might be starting off slowly. The trick for the second book then is to move forward without the advantage of being a whole new world. Collins does this quite nicely by viewing that world through newly opened eyes. Very early in the second book, CATCHING FIRE, the life Katniss looked forward to living after surviving the Hunger Games is shattered. It is revealed that the Games continue outside the arena. What she has experienced of life, true of most teenagers, is barely the surface of what is really going on and that forces are at odds behind the scenes that she had no idea were at play. For YA fiction, the book does a very nice job of allowing the creeping ill will of life under a dictatorship to grab the reader and slowly begin to tighten it's grip. A sickening dread pervades the book extending even to the love triangle--Katniss cannot separate her small picture from the larger one. While still prone to teen flights of emotion, Katniss is shown to have grown and when forced into the games again, does so with a new maturity. While the twist at the end of the book was something I suspected was coming, it was not accomplished in a predictable way. If I had a quibble with the follow up, the second half seems a bit rushed. There are a slew of new characters thrust upon the reader and I didn't completely have a grasp on them before the action took off. On the whole though, the seond book works on its own as well as setting up for the final installment.