I re-read the last three pages of Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay) again and again. For some reason, that delicious ending gave me everything I needed and so I took more. I won't give it away, but let's say that while war harms us irrevocably, love is stronger than that. War kills and death surrounds us - deaths in vain, deaths of violence, deaths caused by our own negligence and disregard. Yet love is the reason for living. Love bring us to a better place. Love is maybe as close to God as I will ever get.
I'm not really a proper reviewer of books, as I tend to just give my emotional reaction to a story, but that's ok. I am a person led very much by my emotions and so if I love something, it is as high a recommendation as a carefully written rationale. The Hunger Games sometimes took a long time to engage me--the exposition of the second and third book's first halves was necessary but languid--but the best scenes were the action scenes. I tried to think of the hero, Katniss, and whether she was a strong young woman with hero merit or simply a heroine with a pretty face who carries a war forward because she is the sexual objective of men (like so many other contemporary heroines (coughBellaSwancough). But Katniss is strong, and not pretty nor particularly smart. She is plain, and full of fire and anger and does not forgive easily. I was pleased with this new addition to modern feminist characters.
In my own life I strive to let love show me the way. I am having some sort of a love/existential crisis, relationship-wise, but I am choosing to move forward through it and see what the other side holds. Maybe happiness. Maybe hunger. I want to know; I have to know.
Courage is just fear, plus walking.
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