I doubt there is anything that makes me fall for a book faster than a damaged main character. Is Katniss damaged after her win at The Hunger Games? Oh, absolutely. The willingness to kill to survive doesn’t make it easier, especially when said survival is a farce, a forced situation so twisted that people celebrate it.
Add in a personal threat from President Snow, who doesn’t even try to hide who he is, or the vileness of his actions from Katniss. Instead her simply threatens to kill everyone she knows and love, because clearly she’s already willing to die for those people or else she wouldn’t have been in the games in the first place.
So Katniss and Peeta go on their victory tour. And continue to fake their love for each other. (I’m not fooled. It might not be true love, but they do love each other. Their experiences in The Hunger Games programmed them to trust and understand each other, much like people who have been to war understand things about each other that civilians don’t.)
When that’s not enough, when Katniss’ defiance shows through even her Post Traumatic Stress (because there is absolutely no doubt the girl is suffering. All the victors are suffering.) The flames of rebellion char districts and people. Snow releases vicious attacks to try to smother rebellion and keep the Districts in their place.
The most significant of which is forcing former tributes to re-enter an even more deadly arena and fight again. This time there will be no rules exception to let two people survive, in part because Snow had the last Gamemaker to let Katniss and Peeta both live executed, and secondly because he might just want every single person in that arena to die.
And inside the arena…something is weird. Unlike the last Games everyone seems to be rushing to Katniss’ aid, almost like there might be a secret plot going on…
Catching Fire is often blisteringly painful to read, but impossible to look away from. Reader will find themselves caught up in a war that might just be a mirror to every other conflict out there. It’s so hard to dismiss it as fiction when Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Egypt are all in headlines almost every day and we still have the memory of The Holocaust, genocides in Africa and more oozing marrs in our own history in mind.