Hunger Games 3 – Mockingjay

Suzanne Collins's Mockingjay is the third Hunger Games book for 11 year olds, and it opens with Katniss standing in the ashes of her own home.

What happens

District 12 has been firebombed. She's walking through what's left of it on her own, while rebel hovercraft circle overhead.

Katniss is seventeen now. She got out of the arena, but only just. Her head still aches from a concussion and the hospital drugs make her see things. To keep her thoughts straight she recites a list of plain facts (her name, her age, where she's from).

Then there's the question everyone keeps asking. The rebels living underground in District 13 want her to be the Mockingjay, the face and voice of their revolution. They'll dress her, write her speeches and film her. All she has to do is play the part.

Sound familiar? It does to Katniss. She's been dressed up and put on show before, and she doesn't trust this lot either.

And Peeta is still in the Capitol's hands.

Reading it is very much like being stuck inside Katniss's head. She's angry and grieving and blames herself for all of it. She says she hates almost everybody now (herself most of all). But she's still Katniss. She bargains hard, she insists on keeping her sister's scruffy old cat, and she wants to be allowed out hunting with Gale again.

Be ready for how grim it is from the start. On that first walk through District 12 she passes burned bodies and stumbles into a skull. She can't stop picturing Peeta being tortured. She learns her stylist was most likely killed during questioning. This is a book about war, and it doesn't look away from what war does to people.

So it sits at the very top of the shelf, or beyond it. For a child who finds death and violence hard to shake off, it probably isn't the one yet. If your reader has already been through two arenas with Katniss and needs to know what happens next, they'll be gripped.

What to read next

If they're coming to it fresh, go back to the first Hunger Games book, where Katniss wakes up on reaping day and finds her little sister has crept into their mother's bed.