Catching Fire (2009)

*Premise spoilers*

Rolling on through to Catching Fire. I’m really loving this reread, all the little details that are jumping out in hindsight. Let’s get into it!

After the events of The Hunger Games, Katniss is back home struggling with how to move forward. Her bold move in the Arena is fanning sparks of rebellion in a number of districts, and on the eve of her shared “Victory Tour” with Peeta—with whom she has to continue the ruse to the Capitol that they’re madly in love—the president personally lets her know that the lives of everyone she loves will be on the line if she can’t do her job as Capitol puppet and pacify the masses.

Look, Catching Fire is just that girl. She really is. For my money, this is the most uneven book in the series. The great parts are positively scintillating, the type of story and characters that itch my brain so good! If it was like that all the way through, it’d be duking it out hard with Sunrise on the Reaping as my favorite. But there’s a stretch in the middle, between the Victory Tour and the announcement of the Quarter Quell for the 75^th Hunger Games, where it feels like the book is spinning its wheels. I understand Katniss’s conflict as she feels stuck between her fear of the Capitol and her guilt at not using her position/influence to make more of a difference, but the narrative result is kind of clunky. We spend several chapters watching Katniss change her mind back and forth, and it’s all tied up in a bunch of love triangle stuff, which is a weak point of the trilogy anyway. It works a little better for me on reread, but the middle section’s issues still stand out to me.

My first time reading it, I remember that it took me a long time to figure out what the book was actually about. Early on, I figured it’d be about the Victory Tour, but that wraps up so quickly and we hit the wheel-spinning stretch. It’s not until the Quarter Quell announcement that it really zeroes in on its direction, at least for me. But once it does, everything slots into place and the book is basically firing on all cylinders from there. It’s fascinating to see how this Games differs from the one in the first book, from the pre-Games events to the tributes to the Arena itself.

I’d already liked so many of the characters in the first book, and this one introduces a whole host of interesting new ones. It’s also cool to spend significant time getting to know characters from other districts. In The Hunger Games, we mainly know the District 12 crew, some of the Capitol folks, and Rue, getting much smaller glimpses of everyone else. But here, there’s a lot of neat stuff for Finnick and Mags, for Beetee and Wiress, and for Johanna. I love all these characters, and that love has only grown over time. They’re not just functions of Katniss’s journey either—we learn details of some of their backstories, and we’re able to make our own emotional connections with them.

Catching Fire is probably the book I was most excited to revisit this time around, for obvious reasons. It’s so neat to return to our introductions to characters who play such major roles in Sunrise on the Reaping, to look at them through the lens of what I’ve learned about their pasts. For that reason—and the Quarter Quell in general—I’m guessing this one will wind up being my favorite of the reread.

Warnings

Violence (including against teens,) strong thematic elements, disturbing images, sexualization of teenagers, and drinking/drug references.