The entire chapter-by-chapter review.This book took a serious nose dive in quality from the first one. All the problems in The Hunger Games -- the world-building fails, the anti-feminism, the poor logic, the protagonist centered morality -- all of it shows up again here and gets magnified. A lot of the problem comes from the larger scale that this book deals with. In The Hunger Games, it was mostly acceptable that the story focused on Katniss and made her the star. It was okay that she was hyper-focused on her own survival. In a story about a whole country rebelling? That's when it becomes unacceptable to make everything revolve around Katniss. She can be a player, a major player if you want, but she should not eclipse the fact that, well, the entire country is starting to rebel. And yet, in this book, she did. The pacing suffers a lot from this fact. Despite spending the first act setting up a rebellion story, that gets dropped in favor of having the entire country focus on Katniss again as she goes into the arena for a rehash of the last book. And that rebellion plot? It gets dropped hard. While the overall narrative still carries on the rebellion, this doesn't really make a reappearance until the very end. Katniss doesn't have anything to do with the rebellion. While this makes sense for her as a character, it's terrible for the story structure, because the plot we just dedicated 33% of the book to becomes extraneous fluff. It has no significance or influence over the rest of the book. If it had been cut out and we'd just opened with the Quarter Quell, our understanding of the rest of things would not have changed. The lack of carry-over from one scene to the next is a big problem throughout the series, but it's especially evident in this.And least we forget:(courtesy of Ghirardelli)
