Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

I waited so long to write on this book that I don't recall my thoughts very well.  I remember that I felt this trilogy probably could have been only two books.  This second title and the third, Mockingjay, seemed to stretched out in order to make two books and the reading became a little more tiresome.

These novels were quick and easy to read like much of young adult fiction.  The narrator, Katniss, doesn't withhold much from the reader and that makes it easy to enter her story.  The drama of the districts, her fight with President Snow, and her second competition in the hunger games is interesting albeit increasingly less believable.  In The Hunger Games, it was easy to read on because the notion of putting children in such a horrific situation was something you wanted to witness as Collins created it.  I also thought it was relevant social commentary for the time we live in.  However, in this book Collins creates a larger political role for Katniss - and this only grows bigger into the next book.  Katniss has a fighter's mentality - she fights Snow as she had fought off starving as a younger child.  From that perspective it's an interesting story as she continues to fight but on a very different battleground that she doesn't understand as well.  Fighting Snow is complicated, fighting off hunger was a hard and scary fight but one she knew how to wage.

Second to this central story of Katniss is her relationship with Peeta.  On one level this relationship, along with Katniss and Gale's, is very manufactured.  Gale seems to represent Katniss' fighting attitude while Peeta seems to speak to something softer about herself she never had the chance to explore.  These relationships are like externalizing those competing interests in herself.  However, I still found Peeta/Katniss' narrative an interesting one.  They shared a moment as youngsters when he gave her food because she was starving, but the hunger games hijacked that relationship and made it an unreal one created only for the media to consume.   Then within that crazy situation Katniss has to sort out how she feels about him and herself.

For me that was the most interesting aspect of these books.