Smoozed Brute heart of a brute like SMOO: A Dalliance.

So despite the hundred-person hold on it according to NYPL.com, I got my hot little hands on a copy yesterday–– I love living in an area where people only use the library to surf myspace. I can see why it didn’t get quite quite as good reviews as its predecessors, but they set the bar fairly high. I read each of them in one sitting; only Mockingjay was the one I could have put aside at one point and waited for the morning. Not that I did, but, you know, I could have. The Hunger Games has to be one of the best-paced books, I’ve ever read, though, so I can understand being unable to keep that up three books straight.

I thought the book felt a little condensed. It was hard to get a sense of how much time went by, as a great deal of it was spent with the heroine hiding in a closet. She was also frequently drugged or in a questionable mental state, and her confusion kind of leaks all over the narrative, so it was sometimes hard to get attached to the “reality” of the book, rather than Katniss’s internal narrative.

Overall, though, this might be the thing that elevates the series from an engaging dystopic YA to a much more mature rumination on war and perception and morality. Things that I didn’t really like, like the confusion after the book’s climax(es) (Katniss actually did a lot of waking up in the hospital instead of, you know, continuing to narrate the action) and the periodic deaths of well-liked characters without much fanfare, really served to differentiate the books from your standard sci-fi savior narrative, and its uneasy, quiet ending— oh, the ending.

Before Mockingjay, I read On Beauty, and, upon finishing the book, thought Zadie Smith has a way with language, put it on my bedside table, and didn’t think about it again. Before that, I closed an anthology of Muriel Sparks stories and was suitably creeped out, but they didn’t really stay with me. The last line of Mockingjay, though… both the end of the story and the end of the epilogue, I whispered both lines to myself as I fell asleep and they were the first thing on my mind this morning. I’m a sucker for the subdued happy ending usually (also, I was for Peeta from the beginning, so there was some fangirl-level joy there), but that and the last line of the epilogue chilled me. What an incredible, realistic encapsulation of war and trauma and change. This book will stay with me.