Catching Fire

Catching Fire is the second book in The Hunger Games trilogy. Catching Fire begins right where The Hunger Games ended, so make sure you've read that one first or you'll be lost. As I said in my review of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and the next book, Mockingjay, do not work as stand alone books. If you're going to read Catching Fire, you're committed to reading Mockingjay.

Catching Fire is the weakest as a story of the three books. The pacing is great, there's not a lot of boring riffraff, it's very entertaining, but it takes until almost the very end of the book for anything really important to be revealed. You will be asking yourself why you just read a lot of what you just read. That doesn't make it any less entertaining, just weak as a piece of the trilogy. If you're only looking at how enjoyable it is, this one is better than Mockingjay but not as good as the Hunger Games.

Catching Fire is also when a lot of the problems in this trilogy begin to surface. The Hunger Games was a very fun, violent, deep story that happened to follow a very emotional teenage girl. Catching Fire starts to focus a bit on the wishy-washy-emotional-ness of our very boring, typical, teenage protagonist. Feelings of love/need-for-a-romance-in-this-otherwise-fantastic-young-adult-book begin to creep in, no doubt trying to play off the success of another popular young adult book about a faceless moron and her fetish for dead people and dogs.

Luckily, Katniss and friends find themselves in another Hunger Games, so lots of manly things like people being stung to death by bee-like insects, drownings, gassings, and explodings are aplenty in the pages of Catching Fire. If you liked The Hunger Games, I have little doubt you'll be entertained by Catching Fire.

Catching Fire, like The Matrix Reloaded, is fun on its own. But, because it relies on Mockingjay for its closure, it leaves you feeling empty and needing more. The comparisons between the Matrix don't end there. Like The Matrix trilogy, the first one is the best and stands on it's own just fine, and the second one is good but needs the third one for closure.