simply janet

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was so heavily invested in this series and in this story that there was only one conclusion I was willing to accept when I started reading Mockingjay — my 5-star rating illustrates that not only was I not disappointed, I was fully satisfied. The provocative ideas in the final book of the trilogy have me considering questions about what we choose to believe about our friends and also about our perceived enemies. Ultimately, our enemies aren’t others as much as they are the movements or ideas that would encourage the destruction of our fellow human beings. Sometimes WE truly are our own worst enemies. We often have to fight for and discover what’s REAL and true — and that’s the battle that rages in Katniss, Gale, Peeta and others in this final book.



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Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I took this book along to read on vacation, and while I liked it, I didn’t LOVE it as much as I expected to. Similar to my feelings while reading The Thief Lord, the thing that hampered my enjoyment of both books (I couldn’t even finish The Thief Lord) was the pacing. The plot just wasn’t moving along. Several times, when it felt as if things were moving along to some great development, it would slow down to a crawl, and I would find myself yawning uncontrollably. In the literary world, shouldn’t there be limit to the number of times a character can bump up against the same difficulty or obstacle and have no resolution?



One of the things I did enjoy about the book is Meggie and her father’s great affection for and appreciation of books — books that are leather bound, have titles imprinted with gold leaf, and enhanced with fancy endpapers. Meggie’s father Mo (short for Mortimer) makes his living as a bookbinder; a lot is written about their shared love for books in their physical form. Ironically, (or perhaps expectedly), Cornelia Funke‘s books aren’t available in Kindle format.



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