Sometimes having a good idea just isn’t enough. This might hurt, but it’s the truth. For whatever reason, sometimes writers have amazing ideas that don’t pan out. And when those ideas stall mid-story, they take the entire book down with them.

In Brains: A Zombie Memoir, Jack Barnes is an English professor who gets bitten during the zombie apocalypse. After transforming, he discovers that he can still think and still feels like himself—aside from a craving for brains and human flesh. Also, he can still write (not too shabby for a decaying corpse), though he can’t speak. So Jack travels across the United States, gradually finding other “smart zombies” like himself, looking for the scientist who unwittingly unleashed the zombie virus on the world.

When I put it that way, Brains sounds downright intriguing. Who doesn’t want to hear about the zombie apocalypse from the zombie’s perspective? Much to my disappointment, Brains isn’t just bad; it’s terrible. It falls flat in almost every respect: characterization, plotting, and humour are all gruesomely murdered and resurrected as zombie versions of themselves. It’s been a while since I read a book as bad as this. I considered not finishing it, but at only 168 pages, I decided to stick it out until the bitter end.

The length alone is an early indication that the Robin Becker lacks enough story for a good story. After all, her premise is sound and exciting. But after Jack has been transformed and starts wandering across the country, Brains suddenly loses all sense of direction or even progress. So what that he’s going to find Howard Stein? So what that they’ve made it to Chicago? The book drags on and on, describing Jack’s newly found affinity for brains and how he’s drooling over Eve, the hot-but-stupid zombie, and I’m just waiting for something really interesting to happen or for real conflict to break out. Finally, with the pages rapidly running out, we reach a climax of sorts as Jack confronts his creator. But it’s actually very anticlimactic, because the end is not difficult to predict. To Becker’s credit, she tries to include revelations and ruminations that are deep and meaningful … but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t really care whether Jack or his new zombie-friends survive.

I don’t read (or watch) much zombie fiction. Like the larger horror genre in general, it is not my cup of tea. I don’t find zombies very interesting as monsters. Whether they are the traditional shamblers or the new-school runners, zombies don’t impress me. Zombie stories tend to deliver two interconnected moral dilemmas: the cost of survival and the fate of a main character who has been bitten. It’s certainly possible to write excellent, creative zombie stories—still, most of the zombie stories I like tend to be the ones that parody or deconstruct the genre instead of playing it straight: Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland (although it played the genre straight to some extent) … Fido was really weird but had its moments. I enjoyed Feed and found it problematic in equal doses. (I notice now that I have a similar genre-generalizing paragraph in that review. Good to know I’m being consistent in my opinion of zombie fiction!) So a zombie book has to work harder to impress me, perhaps, than someone who is more invested and more forgiving of this genre. But Brains hardly seems to work at all.

This is mostly Jack’s fault. He’s an asshole, and he admits it. He claims dying has changed him for the better, but I disagree. I don’t think he’s any closer to having a soul now (if souls existed) or being a better person as a zombie: he goes around eating brains, biting people to turn them into zombies at a whim, and dropping pop culture references in an attempt to sound erudite and hip at the same time. His diction, I gather, is supposed to have a similar effect, and I suppose I can’t fault Becker for her ability to establish a voice for Jack. It’s just not a voice I like very much, and regardless of Becker’s intentions in this matter, it adversely affected my enjoyment of the book. Frankly, I had no emotional investment in zombie Jack or his great plans for his smart-zombie gang. The only zombie I cared about was Guts, because Becker managed to make him cute and endearing, but even that was only a surface affection on my part.

It is possible that I could have found it in myself to overlook Jack’s unsympathetic nature if Brains had a more compelling plot. Without going into too much detail, however, nothing interesting happens here. Brains is just … boring. With no reason to care about the main character and little interest in the thin plot, I had a difficult time making it through this short book. That’s a shame. There’s a reason we describe books as page-turners or non-stop action thrill-rides; we yearn for books that draw us into a wider universe beyond the story on the pages and make us salivate for knowledge of that universe. Described in such a florid way, perhaps it sounds like a tall order for a book that might claim to be some “light zombie fun”. I don’t think it is, which is why I’m being so hard on this book. Not only is Brains pointless, but it could be much better. I really like the main idea and wish it were better executed.

I’m not so convinced this is all Brains’ fault. The blurbs on the back of this book, which have no doubt been carefully selected to give an impression of agreement, all praise it along the same line. Using adjectives like “smart”, “snarky”, “witty”, and “clever”, these reviewers cast Brains as a “smart” book that taps into popular culture. This idea, that pop culture allusions and a sarcastic narrator are sufficient ingredients for a “smart” book, seems to be a literary myth of sorts. It conflates style with substance and rewards an empty feeling of currency over true depth and emotional impact. That’s not to say that all books that feel current or have lots of pop culture allusions are bad—but these alone do not a good story make. So Brains might be a “smart” book, but it’s a stupid story. If your decaying corpse is lusting after some ripe zombie fiction, look elsewhere—this feast is far from fresh.

Whole brain emulation and mind uploading are science-fiction concepts that I love, because they raise really complicated questions related to philosophy of mind, a particular field in philosophy that I find very fascinating. Moreover, it’s scary how close we might be to achieving these in real life. Some critics have made very compelling cases for why this isn’t possible—but no one has been able to prove it, one way or another. Where scientists cannot yet go, science-fiction authors can speculate and explore the ramifications of this type of technology. Richard K. Morgan uses it to good effect in Altered Carbon. Joss Whedon did it really well in the tragically short-lived Dollhouse series. In the sixth episode, “Man on the Street”, short interview-style clips of people commenting on the dollhouse-as-urban-legend are interspersed throughout the main story. The very last interviewee says:

If that technology exists—it’ll be used. It’ll be abused. It’ll be global. And we will be over. As a species. We will cease to matter. I don’t know, maybe we should.

Chills run down my spine whenever I recall this quotation. It emphasizes the Pandora’s Box that our technological advances continue to be. The atomic bomb was perhaps the first such advance, and it won’t be the last. If we develop the ability to alter our memories and identities in such a fundamental way, and someone decides that it will be profitable to do it to people against their will, then we are done.

Sadly, both Whedon and Matt Forbeck paint a realistic picture of how this might happen. Whereas Whedon is more concerned with exploring several questions related to identity, autonomy, and self-determination, Forbeck focuses on just one: what happens when mind-uploading, combined with cloning, allows for immortality? His answer is a United States ruled by an oligarchy of amortals, the richest of the rich who can afford the exorbitant price to have their minds backed up and loaded into a clone whenever their current body dies. The protagonist of Amortals, Ronan Dooley, is an everyman who finds himself an amortal because he was the first, the prototype, a Secret Service agent saved from the bullet he took for the President thanks to the Amortals Project.

In this near-future America, there are groups and movements who do not think the amortals are people. Rather, they are copies of people. Is this Ronan really the same as the original Ronan, or is it just a copy of his mind? If I upload my brain to a computer and run it on the computer, are there two of me? Which one is more “real”? This is a question philosophers of mind like Daniel Dennett have considered for a while now, and it’s definitely something that will come to a crisis if mind uploading ever becomes a reality. For what it’s worth, I’m not sure where I stand on the matter.

On one hand, I do not believe in any kind of immortal soul or Cartesian duality: to me, the brain and the mind are a single thing. So it’s true that a copy of my brain is going to be a copy, but if it’s a perfect copy, then it’s still me. If there is no difference, no way to distinguish between the two (except that one of them might be in a box instead of a body), then how can I say one is more “me” than the other?

On the other hand, I read some articles by N. Katherine Hayles when taking Philosophy of the Internet course last year, and she has some very convincing arguments in favour of an embodied perspective—that consciousness as a phenomenon is heavily linked to being embodied. And even if I am correct and there is no such thing as an immortal soul, I still feel like there is still an issue of continuity. If I’m Ben I and I meet an untimely end in an unlikely accident involving reading and a particle accelerator, and Ben II gets activated from a backup I made the week before … Ben II is me, because he has my memories, but the particular instance of me who was Ben I is gone forever. Ben I won’t know or care about this, because he will be dead and in my scenario there is no life after death—and Ben II won’t care, because as far as he sees it, he’s just like Ben I. So it creeps me and reassures me at the exact same time, if that makes any kind of sense. And if it doesn’t, then I suppose this demonstrates just how confusing this whole matter can be!

Forbeck doesn’t quite go into the matter of identities to the extent I, as a philosophy geek, might have loved. But I’m not going to fault him for that. Instead, he chooses to focus on the social and political consequences of this ammortality and the existence of the amortal class. Ronan Dooley is amortal, but it’s as a result of his continued membership in the Secret Service. He isn’t rich enough to afford ammortality himself (this becomes a plot point at least twice), so he is an outsider. Not only are we supposed to identify with him, but he becomes a credible lens through which we can critique the institution of amortality.

Though Forbeck discusses in his afterword how the idea for Amortals goes back to the nineties, this book has an extremely current feel to it. In particular, a lot of the critique that Forbeck levels at the United States government and at amortals sounds like the discontent that has found a voice in the Occupy Wall Street movement. There is a perception, which I happen to share, that the much-vaunted democracy of the United States (and to a lesser extent, similar nations like Canada and those in the EU), has become a plutocracy, with power concentrated in the hands of the super-rich and corporations (who are, in many ways, interconnected and almost indistinguishable). Whether this perception is accurate is debatable, but Forbeck indulges in a cynical what if? game to show us what the United States could become.

After all, once the rich have the ability to live forever by cloning new bodies and downloading all their memories, why bother curing diseases like AIDS or malaria? These tend to affect the poor, huddled masses. Why bother providing health care at all? So Forbeck’s vision of Washington, D.C. is a city that has slowly begun to collapse under the weight of an under-maintained infrastructure and a neglected population. We’re given to understand that this is true for the United States in general. One quibble I have with Forbeck is the implication that amortality has slowed the pace of technological innovation as a whole. Unless he’s implying that this is a deliberate conspiracy to prevent innovations that could grant the masses more freedom (an implication that I don’t see), then I don’t see how this follows.

Plus, there’s the fact that being the only amortal in a family just sucks. Ronan is turning 200 as the book begins (the White House throws him a birthday celebration the same night as he was downloaded into his latest body). He’s survived his wife and five generations of descendants. Ronan Dooley V and his son, Ronan Dooley VI (whom we call Five and Six for short), are still alive, but for the first part of the book they remain estranged from our Ronan, who has let ties lapse. Being amortal among people who cannot afford amortality is much like being an immortal among mortals: doomed to watch those you care about grow old and die, even as those who replace them come to see you either as a legend or a relic—or both. Ronan is lonely in so many ways. He’s isolated. And he’s armed. So he’s not just dangerous—he’s dangerous with a helping of basket case waiting in the wings.

I suppose I should eventually review the story instead of rambling on about how fascinating mind uploading is. This time Ronan wakes up to find out that he didn’t die saving the President from an assassin—someone murdered him and posted the video online. So he has to solve his own murder, because it’s bad publicity, but as a result of his laxity with making backups, he has lost the last six months of his memories. This hinders the investigation. You know what else hinders the investigation? People trying to kill him again. Or his partner.

As a thriller, Amortals is unquestionably well-paced and exciting. Forbeck knows how to keep the reader engaged. The key is not to avoid dull moments, because lulls provide the reader (not to mention the protagonist!) a chance to pause and process the action scenes. But they need to be carefully planned and constructed for maximum effect—something that Forbeck does well. There were numerous moments when the chapter ended on a kind of cliffhanger, one that I hadn’t really seen coming and even evoked a sense of genuine peril and vulnerability. This is difficult to do, even in a book where people can come back from the dead, because we generally don’t expect the protagonist to die unless it’s at the end.

As a mystery, Amortals is unremarkable and bland. I figured out the identity of Ronan’s killer before the end of the first chapter. Unlike my dad—my first question when I see him reading a new mystery is always, “Did you figure out who did it yet?”—I don’t usually do that. It’s supposed to be a twist, I suppose, but it’s predictable if one is familiar with these types of science-fiction stories. And I kind of feel like the murder mystery becomes sublimated to the eventual plot concerning political machinations and conspiracy theories. That being said, Forbeck makes it worth our while, pulling out a few more twists that I didn’t see coming and finishing with an ending that is almost more open-ended than I can bear.

Owing to its unimpressive mystery, I was going to give Amortals two stars. Ronan is a solid protagonist, but I didn’t much care for his voice. The other characters are somewhat two-dimensional, particularly the antagonists. Yet as I write this review, it becomes apparent that Forbeck still managed to strike a nerve with me. Maybe it’s a particularly sensitive nerve, and people who aren’t as interested in these concepts will not find the book as enjoyable. But it’s enough to prompt me to reevaluate my rating. Amortals, while far from being amazing or even very remarkable on its own, is enjoyable and, in some ways, quite thought-provoking. It’s definitely deeper and more nuanced than the type of thriller I tend to condemn in my reviews, and hence Matt Forbeck demonstrates the power of well-conceived science-fiction as a setting and as a plot device: it provides a framework that makes for a better, more substantial story. Ultimately, that’s what I’m after.

Our capacity for language is one of the attributes often cited as what makes humans so distinct from other animals. It’s a controversial distinction, because we’ve observed other species communicate in very interesting and effective ways: whales sing, dolphins whistle, birds do whatever it is they do to switch places while in formation. Parrots, of course, can be trained to mimic human speech! But there’s a difference between replicating instinctual sounds with fixed meanings and being able to learn language—to use it in innovative ways. When we look to other species who might possess this capability, we naturally turn to one of our closest relatives: chimpanzees.

There are many famous cases of attempts to teach primates signs or some other type of “language”: Koko, Washoe, Nim. The last has received recent publicity in the form of a documentary, Project Nim, and Washoe and Nim quite resemble Zan, the fictional cross-fostered chimp in Half Brother. Although it seems evident that Kenneth Oppel researched these projects, and others like them, for this book, it would have been interesting to hear how they inspired him in his own words. I guess afterwords or author’s notes aren’t all that common in young adult fiction (but maybe they should be).

I’m reading this book because my associate teacher in my second practicum is reading it to her Grade 8 class. I picked it up the week before my practicum, because it seemed like the thing to do. Oppel has been around since I was a kid—I’m pretty sure I read at least Silverwing—but I never quite became a “fan” of him. I skipped a huge chunk of YA fiction when I was that age as I jumped right up to more sophisticated stories—mysteries and then, in Grades 7 and 8, fantasy and science fiction. Now, as I prepare to teach those grades, I’m making a conscious effort to look out for interesting young adult fiction. Not only will it help me understand the mindset of my charges, but it will give me some practical recommendations if my students ever ask me what to read.

I ended up enjoying Half Brother a lot more than I expected—though why that’s so is beyond me, because I really like chimpanzees. If there’s one thing I love about David Brin’s Uplift series, it’s the possibility of letting chimps talk. Sure, they’re sexually rapacious and somewhat brutal … but they’re also so fascinating. Look into those deep eyes and see how much they perceive, how much they understand, how much they can empathize … I don’t know if words like sentient or sapient are accurate, but there’s something going on there. Of course, experiments trying to narrow that something down inevitable run into ethical issues.

Ethics plays a role in Half Brother, as does a slew of other motifs. This is a very rich novel in terms of potential for discussion with a class. One can discuss the ethics of animal testing: should we experiment on chimps? What about medical testing on animals? Cosmetics testing? Where do we draw the lines? And then we can go deeper: the protagonist, Ben, repeatedly comments that Zan isn’t human, but he is a person. So that raises the question of what personhood is, if not humanity. What does it mean to be a person? Fifty or sixty years ago, we were having those discussions about people who weren’t white. A century ago we were having them about people who weren’t male. Now we’re having them about people who aren’t necessarily our own species. The times, they change, but the conversations stay the same.

Then there’s Ben. The fact that he shares my name certainly helps. As the book opens he is about start Grade 8, and he finishes Grade 9 before the book’s end. For the most part, Oppel does an excellent job portraying Ben as a genuine 13-year-old boy. The vocabulary and syntax are accurate, and the ways Ben conceptualizes and explains events reflect the thinking of someone just on that cusp of adolescence. And he has a crush! Oppel sets up parallels between Ben’s interactions with Zan (Project Zan) and his attempts to get closer to Jennifer Godwin (Project Jennifer). It’s cute and adorable, and I’m sure that actual Grade 8s in my class find it icky and weird. (Occasionally, Oppel stretches the credibility of what he has Ben write—I doubt a 13-year-old boy would describe his crush as “luscious”.) I’m kind of interested to see what the girls think of how Ben is acting!

One curious note: this book seems to be set sometime before 1977. According to Wikipedia, this is when Canada switched its speed limit signs to kilometres per hour—early in the book Ben mentions a sign in miles per hour, which really jumped out at me. Aside from that incident and the frequent mention of records and record stores (at first I just thought these kids were all unspeakably retro), Oppel never makes it obvious that this book is set in the near past; there are few enough indications of the timeline. To be honest, I’m not sure why he chose this. I have some guesses. Perhaps he wanted to be closer to the era when the real chimp language experiments were running. Perhaps he needed an environment where a teenager wouldn’t have access to the Internet or to a cell phone. I’m not sure.

For a book with a such a simple and, yeah, predictable narrative, there’s quite a bit going on in terms of story. Ben gets to know Zan and starts thinking about the ethics of what his father is doing. This leads to issues with his dad, particularly when the project begins foundering and his dad makes a number of questionable decisions related to Zan’s wellbeing and future. Moreover, Ben has trouble getting the marks necessary to satisfy his father, who feels Ben merely needs to try harder. Oppel is careful to portray Ben as a kid who does try hard (mostly) but happens not to be so hot at academics. He struggles even more as he attempts to find his social position at a new, private school. All of these sub-plots are detailed and fine-tuned in such a way that they’re ripe for discussion, but they never subsume the main story about a boy and his chimpanzee.

I admit, I teared up at the ending. It’s somewhat contrived, but that doesn’t reduce its power. Oppel gives us a send-off carefully calibrated to be bittersweet, “happy” in some ways but also heartbreaking in others. Half Brother doesn’t take half measures in this regard: everything is either an emotional high or an emotional low, and while it can feel exhausting at times, I also think it keeps the book interesting. There’s a volatility to the story that probably works well to hold the attention of a younger audience. At the same time, as I describe above, Oppel does not condescend to his audience at all. The issues are real and important, and the language he uses is authentic. In a world were certain popular young adult fiction has protagonists who do nothing but swoon over competing mythological boyfriends and faint during all the interesting scenes (I name no names), I’m happy there are far superior alternatives.

I’m terrible at explaining orally what books are about. Two people, the sort of people who don’t read books like this, asked me what Scratch Monkey is about while I was reading it, and I stumbled over my reply. “It’s a far-future posthuman story featuring nanotechnology and strong AI,” I mumbled, knowing that this explanation would make no sense to them and is more an over-generalization of the setting than any useful description of plot or story. This is why I write reviews, but unlike Oshi, I cannot simply beam the content of my review into someone’s wisdom implant. (I have been known, when asked what I thought of a book, to look up my review on my phone and shove it at someone’s face—but this has not exactly become an acceptable social convention yet, so I do it sparingly.)

Scratch Monkey is a far-future posthuman story featuring nanotechnology and strong AI. Specifically, it’s the spiralling narrative of Oshi Adjani, a human agent of an AI she calls “the Boss”, which belongs to a category of AIs called the Superbrights. As humanity spread out at sublight speeds across the stars, colonizing worlds in advance through the judicious use of Von Neumann probes, they used planet-sized processors to create a cyberspace afterlife: the Dreamtime. As the Dreamtime became more complex, it gave rise to AIs—the Superbrights—who have gradually co-opted it for their own survival. Humans are thriving, and in most cases functionally immortal, but their destinies are no longer their own.

Oshi begins to see through the veil of the Superbright beneficence, so she becomes expendable data—a scratch monkey. Her Boss dispatches her to a system under threat by the Ultrabrights, AIs expanding outward from the old core of human civilization whose processing power is far superior to that of the Superbrights—and, hence, they are that much more alien. Oshi’s ordered to figure out what’s happening and report back. Or, you know, die trying. Oshi’s job sucks.

Like a lot of its ilk, there aren’t any concepts in Scratch Monkey that haven’t been seen so many times in posthuman fiction. We’ve got AIs, mind uploading, nanotechnology, fast cloning of human bodies, etc. The Gatecoder is a nifty idea as a mechanism by which minds travel between systems (similar to the idea of “needlecasting” in Altered Carbon, but with a clone of your body grown when you arrive instead of being downloaded into any old sleeve). I can also see echoes of this plot in some of Stross’ other works, notably Singularity Sky, where the main character is an agent of the Eschaton. Despite his conclusion that strong AI will be so advanced it will essentially start running the show, Stross seems fairly confident that humans will always be necessary as intermediaries and physical agents. It’s interesting to see the direction he takes with Oshi.

Oshi is really quite a damaged person. It all goes back to her childhood as a blind beggar—blind because her uncle gouged out her eyes to make people more sympathetic for her. After being rescued by some of the Boss’ agents and put into a training program, her graduation mission goes awry. We get treated to some fairly extensive flashbacks (and these seem more like a strategy of padding out what was originally a novella into a novel-length work of fiction than meaningful parts of the narrative) that detail what goes wrong and why it’s screwed up Oshi so badly. After arriving in the Ridgegap-47 system, Oshi finds herself in the middle of a crisis even her Boss couldn’t predict: the system’s Superbright has gone mad, setting itself as an Egyptian god, and a lethal Ultrabright probe is on its way.

I’ll hand it to Stross: for all his obsession with infodumping, he still manages to keep the story moving at a clipping pace. The last third of Scratch Monkey is a harried race against time for survival, first as Oshi and her ragtag band of untrained resistance fighters square off against Anubis, then as they attempt to hijack the Ultrabright probe and use it to evacuate their minds from the system before the Ultrabright itself moves in. The stakes just keep getting higher and higher, the situation worse and worse, with each plan of Oshi’s madder than the last.

It all seems very exciting. I just wish I knew what the hell was going on. As the book raced to its abrupt, somewhat dangling denouement, I felt like comprehension was increasingly slipping away from me, growing further out of reach with each page. I think this happened because, despite the constant exposition, I never did develop a good sense of what the rules were in this universe. Stross is keenly aware of and loyal to the realistic, relativistic mechanics that would govern space travel and space warfare—but, you know, I admit I’m not. So Oshi would say, “We have to do x,” as if it were obvious that x is the only correct course of action in that situation—and to anyone in her universe, it would probably make sense. For those of us who regard relativity as a nifty scientific theory but don’t actually comprehend how it applies to everyday life, Scratch Monkey requires a great deal of nodding and smiling, much more than I remember in Singularity Sky.

Perhaps this roughness comes from the book’s origins as a novella that Stross initially did not sell then dusted off and expanded into this story. I can’t really speculate. In his afterword, Stross discusses how he’s glad the book didn’t sell when it did, because the manuscript needed a lot of work. And I can see that. The first chapter, “Year Zero Man,” which I think was the original novella, is my favourite part of this book. It’s a very satisfying vignette that shows Oshi kicking ass against fairly substantial odds, with an antagonist who sufficiently challenges Oshi’s sense of moral superiority. But “Year Zero Man” is just the prologue for the main plot of Scratch Monkey—and that, sadly, is not as interesting.

My edition is a limited edition published by the NESFA Press and purchased through Subterranean Press. It also includes Stross’ series of blog posts/essays on the subject of common misconceptions about publishing. As a writer who entertains the notion of one day producing a story worth publishing myself, I found the posts interesting and informative to a degree. Stross is certainly a very opinionated writer. While I don’t always find myself agreeing with the positions he takes, I like that he tries to support his arguments using coherent appeals to hard data, rather than appeals to pathos or ethos.

Charlie Stross is really cool, though, and made this available online. You can read Scratch Monkey online in its own entirety. Or just read “Year Zero Man”. Up to you. I’ll recommend this one for Stross fans, but unless, like me, you’re really into posthuman SF, this story probably won’t do much for you. In conclusion, Scratch Monkey provides another fascinating glimpse at Stross’ particular flavour of posthuman SF. But it doesn’t really add anything to the party or say anything compelling that isn’t in his other works. It was, at times, entertaining, but it never really got exciting.

Culture is a conversation. So intertextuality is an important part of literature, because literature is one of the vehicles of that conversation. What we think of books and stories is influenced by what we’ve previously read. Similarly, authors are influenced by what they read, and the books that sell give rise to trends in the types of fiction (and even non-fiction) that make it to the shelves. Sometimes I find myself reading a book and comparing it, no matter how hard I try, to another book, even if the similarities are few and far between. The connection, once established, is very difficult to sever.

City of Dreams & Nightmare has this overt atmosphere of fantasy to it. There’s magic and spells and demons … but there’s technology that might or might not be arcane, like the kite cape and sunglobes. Ian Whates mixes his magic with a sort of pre-Industrial urban metropolis in a style heavily reminiscient of China Miéville and Perdido Street Station. There’s a subtle but persistent steampunk vibe running throughout this book. It even includes two characters, the dogmaker and the more sinister Maker, who manipulate flesh and machine in a manner that reminds me of Miéville’s Remade. Unfortunately, this comparison does Whates no favours. While Whates is a competent writer with good ideas, City of Dreams & Nightmares never quite crystallizes into the story it wants to be.

It doesn’t help that my ebook edition doesn’t have the section breaks clearly marked. All it does is not indent the first paragraph of the new section—a distinction that is not easy on the eyes. Furthermore, the two major protagonists both have names that begin with T—Tylus and Tom! This is hardly a huge problem, and the formatting issue is far from Whates’ fault. But it’s a small annoyance that made reading the book slightly more difficult.

As far as the story goes, Whates sets up a great plot with some very cool characters. Tylus and Tom are both all right. Tylus is a newly-minted Kite Guard, a member of an elite squad of police that can unfurl capes and swoop through the multi-tiered city of Thaiburley. Although his parents are pleased with his vocation, Tylus feels unprepared and undeserving of his status. When he witnesses a murder and fails to apprehend the culprit, Tylus jumps at the chance to be assigned to the case, even though it means going down the City Below, Thaiburley’s lowest, meanest row.

What Tylus doesn’t know is that the supposed culprit, a street-nick (thief) named Tom, has been set up by a scheming arkademic. Nothing more than a dupe, Tom was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He returns to the City Below but winds up far from the home territory of his gang. With the help of a young woman named Kat, who fought in the Pits as a child, Tom makes it home only to discover the streets engulfed in chaos created by the Maker.

So even as Tom is framed for murder and Tylus tries to track him down, we have two additional plots: Tom trying to make it home, and the Maker’s sinister plans for the street nicks in the City Below. Whates wastes no time setting these plots in motion and keeping them going … and therein lies the problem. For Whates has created an intriguing setting and interesting plots, but he plays them too close to his chest, allowing neither reader nor characters to become invested in the stakes or the outcomes.

So we get scenes where two characters will discuss Tom and his abilities in a way that clearly telegraphs they know more than he does (or we do). These characters are, if not precisely manipulating events behind the scenes, playing a larger game that we don’t get to see. But it’s all done in the vaguest of language, and that’s what makes it so intolerable. It’s a problem that plagues books with the farm-boy-style hero who has to answer the Call: inevitably you end up with characters who know more about the hero’s potential than he or she does, and if you aren’t careful, the end up talking in clichés.

I could overlook those scenes as merely clumsy. Unfortunately, even though there is plenty of conflict and excellent action sequences in City of Dreams & Nightmare, the resolution leaves me with the feeling that Tom was never in any real danger at all. Even as other characters go off to face the very real possibility of death (or at least some fun dismemberment), Tom gets whisked away at the eleventh hour so that another character can explain how he can save the day with his powers, and how this has all been part of a larger plan all along. Imagine Lord of the Rings if Gandalf showed up at Mount Doom and said, “Don’t worry, Frodo; I got this,” before nonchalantly tossing the One Ring into its fires. Imagine if Luke made it to the flagship only to find Yoda already engaged in a duel with Darth Vader. In City of Dreams & Nightmare, Tom doesn’t save the day; the wise people who work the angles behind the scenes save the day. And with that one decision, a story that could have been excellent instead becomes mundane and boring.

I have to admit that the setting is pretty cool. I liked the explanation Whates provides for why Tom has these abilities; if this were straight-up science fiction, Tom would essentially be a kind of inadvertent hacker. As it is, I will read the next book in this series because (a) I already bought it and (b) it could definitely still improve. I’m not going to write this series off, because Whates clearly has the imagination and the skill to write good books. With City of Dreams & Nightmare though, some of the important details got muddled along the way. The result is a book that’s promising but, in the end, somewhat let me down.

There’s something about the King Arthur legends that fascinate me and tug at my imagination. It’s probably the tragedy of the tale mixed with that message of hope—Arthur’s body spirited away to Avalon to await his return. Merlin is literally the wizard who helps Arthur answer the Call, and I’ve always identified with that archetype on account of my intellectual and autodidactic leanings. So I’m always happy to try a book that attempts to put a new spin on the legend of King Arthur—why not?

Maurice Broaddus deserves commendation for his Knights of Breton Court series. The idea is intriguing: retell (or rather, reimagine) the story of King Arthur as a story of Indianapolis gang warfare. And Broaddus is good at crafting a setting, atmosphere, and characters that all seem authentic. The characters in King Maker run the spectrum: some are not nice at all and have no qualms about using a gun to close a deal; others are more decent and more conflicted about the life they are leading. And because of the way he focuses on Breton Court, Broaddus creates this sense of community within the story that sets the groundwork for connections that would no doubt be important, if I had ever finished the book.

I didn’t even get halfway done. I just couldn’t get into King Maker, try as I might. There’s something to be said for reimagining the Arthur legend or keeping the allusions to it light and subtle—the last thing one needs is a story that hits the reader over the head with allusions to the classic Arthur mythos. Yet Broaddus is almost two subtle. Some things are obvious: Luther is Uther, and his son King is the Arthur analog; Merle is a Merlin figure. But the magic is tentative, almost non-present for what I managed to read of this novel. We get no sense of King’s larger plan, or indeed of anyone else’s plan.

I stopped reading when I realized I had been reading an entire chapter and didn’t know who it was about. There are plenty of characters … but which ones really matter? Which ones are the protagonists? Who should I be cheering for? These are not questions a reader should have to be asking! Obviously King is a protagonist, but he is absent for vicious swathes of the first half of the book, leaving a second string line of characters to take up the slack … and they don’t do it well. King Maker is a soup of scenes and characters that didn’t manage to hold my interest.

It’s conceivable I could return to this after I’m finished my practicum, which has placed constraints on my time that make me less charitable to what I’m reading. But I’ll have to think about it. King Maker isn’t necessarily a bad book; it has some glowing reviews here on Goodreads, so it obviously works for other people. Unfortunately, in my case, it was a clever idea with a payoff that just seemed too far away.

After two somewhat disappointing books, I finally picked up a book I’ve had since at least my birthday. My experience with Kurt Vonnegut remains slimmer than I’d like, with most of it locked away in adolescent memories now slipping beyond the horizon of my mind. So it feels a little odd to be reading Armageddon in Retrospect, theoretically his last work (unless his estate publishes more unpublished tidbits), already. But I did, and I don’t regret it. Clap me in irons if you must!

I’m at a loss for what to say, though. For people who have read Vonnegut and know what to expect, there is nothing much to add. This is a bunch of stories written by Vonnegut. They have that classic Vonnegut feel for language simple in syntax yet fiendish in semantics. Most of them have something to do with war, with World War II, with the bombing of Dresden … at every level Vonnegut examines the assumptions and rationalizations we attempt to internalize about the morality of conducting war. Even the stories that are more removed from this setting, such as “The Unicorn Trap” or “Armageddon in Retrospect” are very much about the horrors that humans perpetrate in the name of the greater good.

The highlight of this collection for most people will be Vonnegut’s final speech, which he finished but could not deliver before his death. Because I am so young and came to Vonnegut so late in his career, this speech, as one of the first if not the only non-fiction work of Vonnegut’s that I’ve read, greatly affected me. It let me see how the humour and his sardonic spin on things is not just something that saturates his fiction. His speech is peppered with jokes—including one about a man who was smuggling wheelbarrows, which I found hilarious—and absurd asides. All the while, this humour is working towards a more serious end.

Sometimes we laugh because, if we don’t, we’d have to cry … I think that’s kind of what Vonnegut is doing. He has seen so much that he is not afraid to point out the bad and the good, particularly when it comes to an entity like the United States of America. Vonnegut can critique something while still loving it; this is an ability I feel is on the decline today, when the average level of political rhetoric involves the slinging of epithets about being anti-American or intellectually elitist or, heaven forfend, a science-loving atheist. That’s the brilliance of Vonnegut: he may at times be irreverent, but his is a classy form of irreverence, the type that wipes its shoes on the map before busting into your home and breaking into “The Galaxy Song”. So Vonnegut’s speech, as well as this book in general, provide a nice summary of why his writing is so powerful. His is a voice that speaks not for a generation or for a people or for a school of thought but merely out of a conviction that all humans deserve a healthy dose of dignity and levity.

By far my favourite story, however, has to be “The Commandant’s Desk“. It is told from the point of view of a Czech cabinetmaker whose village has just passed from Russian hands to American ones. He considers this at first to be a cause for celebration and hope: the Russians were cruel masters, as bad as the Nazis, and he had been planning a little surprise for the Russian commandant, who had “requested” a grandiose desk. But, in the not-so-surprising Vonnegut twist, the American commandant turns out to be just as unsympathetic and unstintingly oppressive. The story finally comes full circle with a second twist, which results in a reveal of what the cabinetmaker had been planning all along. In the end, Vonnegut reminds of the dangers of romanticizing the nobility of soldiers (of any nationality) or the justness of occupying another land.

Vonnegut’s writing continues to have a timeless quality to it. His stories have ideas and themes that apply just as much to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as they do to World War II or Vietnam. Illustrations are interspersed between each story, and two in particular—colourful doodles on sticky notes—caught my eye. The first reads: “Darwin gave cachet of science to war and genocide” and the second, “In the U.S.A. it’s winners vs. losers, and the fix is on”. The latter is very easy to interpret in light of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The former seems to be an indictment of the “survival of the fittest” justifications for things like Aryan supremacy or eugenics, though it goes beyond that: thanks to evolutionary theory, there’s now a “scientific” rationale for making war, because only the strong should survive! Anyway, I just enjoyed these illustrations too.

Not much else to say about this book. For those who are less experienced with Vonnegut or new to him entirely, Armageddon in Retrospect might be harder to grok; I’m sure I will get more out of it when I revisit it after having continued my survey of his oeuvre. Confirmed Vonnegut fans will like it. There’s nothing here that is sensational or eye-opening; no secret unpublished gem lurks between these pages. But it is yet another set of compelling thoughts on the relationship between absurdity and necessity that always seems to arises in discussions of war.

The perverse, contrary part of me enjoys panning books that receive wide acclaim. It's a calling (in the same way that being a creepy funeral home director is a calling). Giving a wildly popular book a bad review is almost as fun as giving a bad book a bad review. I'll be honest: it's an ego thing, a sense of smugness that comes from not succumbing to the hype.

So when I like a book, when I really like a popular book, as I did with The Hunger Games, I humour that sceptic-within. I comb through the unfavourable reviews to see if I missed anything, if my emotions, having been manipulated by the author, are clouding my critical evaluation. Such a tonic usually serves to cool my ardour toward a freshly-finished book. Still . . . I really, really liked The Hunger Games. Not enough to gush over it, and to some extent, the unfavourable reviews reminded me of some minor complaints I'll express later.

For all of my scepticism, however, there are some complaints with which I disagree. I found the characterization neither shallow nor sappy. Suzanne Collins' style is easy to read, has well-placed exposition, and perfectly captures Katniss' voice. It was the strength of the protagonist that won me over. After all, the premise of The Hunger Games is certainly not original—and most of my problems with the book are in the premise and setting rather than the plot—so it's Katniss and the cast who carry the story.

There's certainly a debate to be had over this book's "young adult" status. I have some reservations about this whole "young adult" label in general; I won't get into those here. Nor will I discuss charges that this book shouldn't be for "young adults" because it has too much violence and isn't innocent enough. Such statements are absurd. If anything, The Hunger Games isn't young adult fiction simply because the characters themselves don't offer "young adults" anything.

Even this analysis misses the mark, in my opinion. One of Katniss' defining traits is her independence. It's entwined with a resentment toward her mother, who retreated into grief after the death of Katniss' father, forcing Katniss to take care of her mother, her sister, and herself. Not only do I think that adolescents can identify with this sentiment, but I think it's a timeless sentiment of adolescence. For one reason or another, many children eventually find themselves taking care of their younger siblings (or even a parent or two). Responsibility is thrust upon them, unasked for and unwanted, and you have children who are twelve or thirteen years old running a household. This aspect of Katniss' life, while ultimately a product of her post-apocalyptic society, is proximally unrelated to the Hunger Games, to a violence-obsessed and oppressive culture, etc. She's just the most mature member of her family, struggling to keep things together.

Beyond her independence, Katniss is obviously a survivor. But she's not ruthless, not much of a fighter, in fact, even if she's not too friendly to everyone around her prior to the commencement of the Games. This, too, is a product of her life growing up in the Seam. She leads a pragmatic life, trading for what her family needs, with little time to indulge in a rich social life. District Twelve's Seam isn't a community so much as a group of people who have managed to get along so far; only in Katniss' sacrifice of herself to save her sister do we see the people begin to rally around something.

It's that one act of volunteering that initially cements Katniss as a heroine. Prior to that, she was obviously the protagonist, but she hadn't quite won me over. But Katniss' compassion doesn't end there. She struggles with her growing sense of amiability toward Peeta, which could be a problem come Game time. Then, in the Games, she befriends Rue, who reminds her so much of her sister. Katniss is a protector, not a killer, which is why her participation is more than just a tragic loss of a child's innocence (even if one wants to claim that there exists, somewhere, a theoretically innocent child, let's not try to argue that the children of Panem are innocent). It's a tragic waste of an individual who so clearly has a contribution to society beyond "reality TV show celebrity." Even if she survives the Games, she can't ever go back to a "normal life" in the Seam. She'll be a star, and she'll have to mentor next year's tributes—her life will never be the same. The Capitol has her, and it will let her go only in death, if even then.

Those hoping for a story of a girl single-handedly sticking it to a dystopian power will be disappointed. Katniss manages only one or two acts of rebellion against the Capitol (although you could probably get away with viewing the second one as a major rebellion in principle). Indeed, I have some issues with the lack of realism in the way Collins structured her dystopia, with the neat partitioning of geographical districts that provide certain needs to the Capitol. Despite making it such a big part of the plot, however, Collins never addresses many of the thematic issues that arise from the setting in which The Hunger Games takes place. Katniss never does confront the major moral issue, that of becoming a killer.

I didn't find the ending as sappy or too-convenient as some people did. I liked the hesitant nature of the romance (if you can call it that) between Katniss and Peeta. We can't tell if Peeta really cares for Katniss or if he's just going along with it for the sake of the Games, nor can we tell if Katniss really falls for him. It looks like, in the end, Peeta is telling the truth; he really does care for her. At the very least, he's reluctant to kill her when the time comes. The resolution to the necessary showdown is clever and dramatically appropriate.

In my review of The Giver, I called that book "good utopian literature" but said there was much better literature available. The Hunger Games clearly falls into the same genre; yet even though I liked it much, much more than The Giver, I still can't call it better in its handling of a dystopia.

Collins seems to be setting up for a more explicit confrontation against the Capitol in Catching Fire, and hopefully a deeper exploration of the issues inherent to the Hunger Games and the quality of life in Panem. I'll be happy if my hopes are borne out, but the first book in a trilogy should never just be used to set the stage for book two. I'm not saying that makes it a bad book—there's no doubt that it's an entertaining read, and it certainly has worthwhile themes. Nevertheless, I had hoped for more moral conflict, and for a depth that The Hunger Games is lacking. For all of its flashbang excitement and its fast pace, The Hunger Games is heavy on style and light on substance.

Having let my inner sceptic express itself, I'll return now to some praise for The Hunger Games. As an example of dystopian fiction, it's not quite a paradigm case. As science fiction, however, it hits all the right notes. Collins presents us a society very different from our own, but one that's easily imagined and with the same kinds of people who populate our society. Most importantly, she left me wanting more—not only because of my reservations, but because I became invested in these characters and want to learn what the Capitol has in store for them next.

My reviews of The Hunger Games trilogy:
Catching Fire →

Two years, almost to the day, have elapsed since I read the first book in this series. Since then it has gone from trendy young adult sensation to international book series phenomenon. My second student-teaching practicum is in a Grade 7/8 environment, where it seems like every student is reading one of these three books. I even got to accompany my Grade 7 and 8 classes to watch the movie when it came out in theatres. (The movie is nowhere near as good as the book, in my opinion. It has a certain stylistic appeal but beyond that seems to emphasize all the wrong things.) With the popularity of this series so evident in my current situation, I decided it was high time to read Catching Fire. Also, borrowing it from my associate teacher was much easier than putting my name on the waiting list at the library….

As with anything that gets as big as The Hunger Games has, deep divisions and schools of thoughts have emerged surrounding this book and the messages it might or might not send to youth. My ardour for the first book has probably cooled somewhat since I wrote my review, but I remain of the opinion that it’s a good book for adults as well as adolescents. The argument that it’s “better than Twilight,” while true, strikes me as extremely disappointing: what does it say about the state of YA literature that we have to praise things for being better than Twilight?

So I went into Catching Fire with a two-year gap in my memories only partially restored by the movie’s light dusting of plot. I know many of my friends rank this as their favourite in the trilogy, and I can see why. In my first review, I hoped for “a deeper exploration of the issues inherent to the Hunger Games and the quality of life in Panem" in Catching Fire, and for the most part that wish comes true. (We can quibble about depth later.) We get the satisfaction of seeing the fallout from Katniss and Peeta’s survival, including a lengthy and frank conversation between Katniss and President Snow. And Suzanne Collins makes it clear that Katniss’ disobedience has been the catalyst for something so gigantic it might conceivably lead to another rebellion. So much for retiring peacefully.

Alas, I couldn’t help but see Catching Fire as a faint retread of everything in the first novel. Was anyone really surprised that Katniss once again has to fight in the Hunger Games? It seemed like a foregone conclusion the moment the book began that she would end up in the arena again. Once that gets announced, the majority of the book follows the structure from the first book. Granted, it’s much more satisfying than many aspects of the first book: we learn more about the other tributes, for instance, and the description of the Games themselves seems to focus more on the intricacy of their design and less on Katniss’ own need for survival.

In a way, this makes sense: The Hunger Games was about Katniss’ own personal struggles in a harsh, totalitarian world; Catching Fire is a transition to a story that is wider in scope, involving uprisings of entire Districts. Katniss still has a personal stake in this story, but it is clear now that hers is part of a much larger narrative sparked by her unconventional strategy in the Games. Now she has to deal with the consequences, continue being someone she isn’t and try desperately not to say or do anything that could be perceived as rebellious. In the end, of course, she fails miserably, because she can’t help but be the kind and inspirational symbol the would-be rebels all need. This isn’t her fault.

Collins’ problems with creating a believable post-apocalyptic police state continue in Catching Fire. Panem is a very simplistic attempt at a totalitarian government, with the Capitol emerging as little more than snivelling bad guys in this book. We are supposed to believe, from Snow’s visit, that the Capitol finds themselves in a corner of their own painting: Katniss and Peeta are now high-profile celebrities, so the most expedient route of arranging for an “accident” would instead result in martyrdom. Instead, Snow resorts to intimidation of Katniss and then outright oppression of District 12. Thematically, I suppose it’s an effective way for Collins to demonstrate how people who are oppressed to an intolerable point will eventually erupt in violence … strategically, it’s a bonehead move. The Capitol is not a very well-run police state.

So with their precious little system in peril, the Capitol catapults Katniss, Peeta, and a score of other former victors back into the Hunger Games. Once again, Katniss needs to come up with a plan for both tributes from District 12 to survive. One of the more disappointing aspects of The Hunger Games was its failure to address Katniss’ transformation into a killer. To Collins’ credit, Katniss talks a bit about it in Catching Fire, but it still seems to be an issue on the moral back-burner in this series, which is more interested in making sure that Katniss is uncertain about who she should fall in love with. It’s not a coincidence that the tributes who die in the arena are the ones Collins fails to flesh out in any detail—two of them don’t even have names but are just described as morphling (morphine?) addicts.

Combined with a deus ex machina ending of the first order, we’re left once again in a situation where Katniss doesn’t actually have to make any tough moral choices. Yes, there is death and tragedy and sacrifice. But it’s all happening around Katniss, and while some of it is about Katniss, none of it is really her own doing. Which leads me to ask a question that might be somewhat incendiary: is this really better than Twilight? The main premise of that argument is that Katniss Everdeen has much more agency than Bella Swan, who faints at the merest hint of an action scene. To some extent, this is true in the minutiae of the plot, especially in The Hunger Games: Katniss volunteers to be a tribute; Katniss has a strength of will and character that constantly gets her into trouble. She is most certainly not like Bella Swan. Yet her role in Catching Fire is little more than a first-person vehicle for the reader: she is not involved in most of the decisions that seal her fate or Peeta’s; she is constantly overruled by other people (mostly men) who know better how to play this game. Where did my Katniss from the first book go? Who is this changeling that has taken her place?

I am intentionally writing this review before I read Mockingjay, which I’m about to start. I don’t want my experience of the third book to influence my opinion of the second. I expect that it will tie up loose ends, both when it comes to the nascent rebellion in Panem and Katniss’ love triangle. I will continue to hope for more depth and more detail when it comes to the dilemmas that are a natural consequence of the events Collins includes in these books. Catching Fire disappoints me, because it seems so uneven. The first part of the book reads like a laundry list of all the problems Katniss has caused, both for herself and for the Capitol. Some these are real and terrifying in the way they remove her ability to choose her own path in life. But this serious discussion evaporates to make way for yet another bout in the arena and another unlikely resolution. It’s like there’s two books in here, one that is really good and studious but probably somewhat boring, and one that is exciting and flashy but probably not very substantial. Both of them are vying to come to the fore, but neither quite manages to win the day.

This criticisms are not meant as a condemnation of the series or this book. The Hunger Games was really good, and while Catching Fire comes nowhere close to meeting that level of quality, it still delivers a pleasant echo of that first hit. I just think there’s plenty of room for improvement. Because I’m not content to settle for “better than Twilight” for myself or for my students. I want something that’s just awesome for its own sake.

My reviews of The Hunger Games trilogy:
← The Hunger Games | Mockingjay

Oh, Mockingjay, I’m just not sure what to do with you.

I suppose that at this point the trilogy has taken on a certain trajectory. Katniss rebelled against the Capitol, inadvertently started an uprising, and now finds herself the face of that revolution regardless of her desires in the matter. It seems inevitable that the third and final book will feature the climax of this uprising, an assault on the Capitol, and one last confrontation with the apparently serpentine President Snow. This is my way of saying that Mockingjay’s predictability was itself predictable and not inherently a bad thing. Unfortunately, Suzanne Collins did nothing to allay my problems with the world and characters she has constructed.

In my review of Catching Fire I lamented Katniss’ loss of agency. This remains a problem in Mockingjay, where Collins explicitly portrays it as part of the conflict Katniss faces: District 13’s leaders want her to be their “Mockingjay”, a face of the revolution for propaganda and inspiration. Collins lays on thickly the parallels between the Mockingjay role and Katniss’ time as a tribute and victor for the Capitol, including an outfit designed by Cinna and her old prep team back for one last bow. She has almost no say in where she goes or what she does, and she is not so much a frontline warrior as a glamour soldier for the cause.

So the question then becomes: does Katniss somehow regain her agency by the end of the book? Does she retake her independence and begin once again making decisions for herself? Arguably she does, but it’s a long time in coming and not very satisfying when it happens. The problem with Mockingjay and, alas, by extension the entire series, is that it confirms the suspicion lurking in my mind since the middle of Catching Fire: Katniss is just a spectator. She was in the right place at the right time to spark a revolution, and now she is going along for the ride.

Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with this. Indeed, perhaps on some level this is how many revolutions work: few symbols intend to be symbols or set out to inspire rebellion. Yet it’s disheartening, especially after the first book’s emphasis on Katniss’ self-determination, to see that she has been reduced to nothing more than an observer. True, without her presence as a symbol the Capitol would likely have crushed the rebellion with extreme prejudice. But that’s all she is, at every turn. Even toward the climax of the novel, when she finally makes it to the Capitol and goes off to murder President Snow, Katniss is just an observer to the final act that ends the rebellion. She wakes up a few days later and gets filled in by another character. (Fade to black: rebellion over.)

This is a dramatic and very strange arc for Katniss’ character. One would expect it to work in reverse: a character with very little volition or agency slowly begins to gain a sense of self and self-determination, culminating in a final act of rebellion or sacrifice that makes the difference. Here, we begin in The Hunger Games with Katniss urging Peeta to commit suicide with her in order to cheat the Capitol of its victor. In Catching Fire she resolves to save Peeta once again but ends up being rescued by District 13 in the eleventh hour. Now, in Mockingjay, she sort of floats around aimlessly for the majority of the novel. Towards the end we get flashes of the former, fiery Katniss, only for any hopes of significant contributions to get dashed by the events I mention above.

Except, of course, it’s not that simple. It never is, is it? Katniss does commit one act so shocking it requires a trial, an act that alters the future of Panem forever—hopefully in a positive way. Try as I might, I cannot pigeonhole Mockingjay or Katniss into a neat little box of disappointment. There are glimmers of hope that are enough to keep me ambivalent about how this trilogy ultimately concludes.

The ending also portrays Katniss as suffering through a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. I don’t want to mislabel anything here—but I think Collins does a good job demonstrating the toll that Katniss’ twisted life has had on her psychology. Although I continue to long for a more explicit discussion of this whole killing thing—because, let’s face it, Collins makes every other message in these books explicit and obvious—I have to admit that the Katniss of Mockingjay is no longer the uncertain child we met at the beginning of The Hunger Games. She is damaged goods now. Worse still, she survives the rebellion. Many characters mention throughout the book, in one of several clumsy incidences of foreshadowing, that no one knows what to do with Katniss.

Collins plays up the “what happens to the warrior after she wins the war” theme very neatly. It’s so easy for a series like this to conclude immediately after the rebellion ends and offer no hints as to the future. Collins instead goes more the Harry Potter route, with an all-too-brief epilogue. But this is enough to let us see the permanent scars to Katniss’ psyche. It’s rather like the exchange between Mal and the Operative in Serenity: the Operative is working to create a better world, a world with no place for men like the two of them. Katniss created a world that no longer needs her, but by dint of all that she has experienced, it’s not the world she needs.

This series has catapulted to absurd heights of popularity. I don’t think it deserves to endure as a literary masterpiece (then again, I don’t make those decisions). Yet I won’t heap upon it unearned condemnation simply because of the hype that follows in its wake. The Hunger Games was a pretty good novel. In many ways, the latter two books are disappointing, especially by comparison. Their stories are still relatively complex, but their characters’ motivations are less fully explored.

In discussing this review and my reaction to the series with a friend, I came to one additional revelation. For all my griping, it seems obvious that these books are far superior to Twilight, and even if one doesn’t always appreciate the story or think highly of the plot and character development, the following is true: these books make readers, particularly teens, think. Katniss doesn’t always have agency, but she has issues beyond wondering whether to date a vampire or a werewolf. She’s trapped in a post-apocalyptic totalitarian police state that forces children to fight to the death! That’s something to talk about. We can have discussions about The Hunger Games beyond “Team Edward or Team Alice?” (Hint: answer is “Team Alice”). That potential for meaningful conversation is valuable.

In the end, though, I think it all comes down to Katniss Everdeen. She is the heart and soul of these books: their narrator, their protagonist, their girl on fire. The books live or die on Katniss’ ability to hold the reader’s interest, to be someone with whom the readers can empathize. We don’t always have to like her, but we have to understand her. In my opinion, the last two books in the series begin to waver in their connection with Katniss. In so doing, they lose what made The Hunger Games so special, fading back into the general noise of all those other books that want to be like them.

My review of The Hunger Games trilogy:
← Catching Fire