Mockingjay

Mockingjay is a novel for young readers by the American writer Suzanne Collins, published in 2010. It is the last of the three books that begin with The Hunger Games.

The story picks up with Katniss recovering in District 13, the underground district the Capitol claimed to have destroyed, where the rebellion is run like a military base. She is asked to be its public face, and she accepts on the condition that the rebels protect the tributes who were left behind and let her kill the man who runs the Capitol. The novel follows the campaign from inside the propaganda machine: the filming, the scripted interviews, the arguments about what a message is worth, and the ordinary soldiers who die around the cameras. Katniss comes to understand that the people running the rebellion are fighting for power as much as for justice, and the later chapters take her into a city that has been prepared for street fighting. It is a war novel as much as a dystopia, and it keeps its attention on what the fighting costs the people who live through it.

Collins ends the series by asking what a person is supposed to do once the cameras stop, and the answer the book gives is not a comfortable one.