In this book, we join up with Katniss Everdeen not long after she had been rescued from the arena in the previous book. She is still in shock after all she had gone through in the previous stories and unsure if she is willing to become the symbol of the rebellion.
After she makes a deal with the rebel leader become the Mockingjay, in exchange for the right to kill President Snow herself. Katniss is put into various situations where she goes outside the boundaries of being a symbol, and instead becoming an active participant in the rebellion, and in doing so, becomes an even greater symbol.
Initially, I was a little taken aback that Katniss' attitude wasn't as heroic as you would expect a protagonist to be. But then I remembered that this heroine is only 17 years old, and in retrospect, many of her inner conflicts and how she dealt with the challenges she faced, are pretty much what you'd expect a kid going through a war to manage with.
I might be wrong, but I think what many of the readers were hoping for in this book was for Katniss to become a virtual perfect heroine, where each decision she made was the correct one, and where everything would be tied up in a nice neat bow at the conclusion, as a result of her actions. In the end, I was really compelled with the fact that the atrocities she witnessed in the war, affected her immeasurably! I found there was a real element of realism in the fact that she seemed to come out of the war with scars that would never heal.
This was a great book, and because of the various story lines within it, I am now a little more forgiving of the fact that the movie version will be split into two films.
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