Catching Fire
2009
- action/adventure
- fantasy
- teen fiction
- juvenile works
- interdependence
- independence
- games
- apocalyptic literature
- competition
- teenage girls
The story
Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the Hunger Games. She and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark are miraculously still alive. Katniss should be relieved, happy even. After all, she has returned to her family and her longtime friend, Gale. Yet nothing is the way Katniss wishes it to be. Gale holds her at an icy distance. Peeta has turned his back on her completely. And there are whispers of a rebellion against the Capitol—a rebellion that Katniss and Peeta may have helped create. Much to her shock, Katniss has fueled an unrest that she's afraid she cannot stop. And what scares her even more is that she's not entirely convinced she should try. As time draws near for Katniss and Peeta to visit the districts on the Capitol's cruel Victory Tour, the stakes are higher than ever. If they can't prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that they are lost in their love for each other, the consequences will be horrifying. In Catching Fire, the second novel of the Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins continues the story of Katniss Everdeen, testing her more than ever before . . . and surprising readers at every turn.
What it’s like
Taut, first-person present-tense prose stays close to a watchful young woman's thoughts, with clipped sentences when tension spikes and longer, sensory passages on frost-bitten woods and the grey soot of a coal town. The palette moves from muted browns and smoke to the glossy pastels and excess of the Capitol, and the contrast is drawn through food, clothing and décor. The mood is wary and smouldering, a slow-building unease that suits a cold night indoors with a blanket and a locked door. The pacing is steady: a long stretch of political tension and uneasy scenes between the leads gives way to a fierce, propulsive run of danger. Violence is significant. Deaths are frequent and some are brutal, though described plainly rather than lingered on for gore, and there are several frightening sequences of peril. Romantic tension is present but restrained, with no sexual content. The emotional register is bruised and intense, following a guarded young woman learning to read people she cannot trust. It is best for readers who enjoy dystopian young adult fiction with a sharp, watchful narrator and can handle sustained peril and bleak, sometimes cruel, events.
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