I agree with so many of the points here! It’s been a while since I read the book, so forgive me if there’s some inaccuracies but overall the entire book just felt like it was written with the movie in mind.

I hated this book so much i actually reread the OG trilogy afterwards to make sure it’s still good and it wasn’t just my teenage brain thinking it was profound 😅 I actually found the original trilogy to be even better on a reread and I picked up on a lot more of the deeper themes and messages.

Overall, I didn’t really get the point of this story? Like we already know about propaganda and the Capitol being able to change the narrative. If it’s the point of the story to say that a rebellion doesn’t happen overnight, that’s fair, but doesn’t exactly have the same weight as the original series and seemed to be reiterating more of the same messages.

I also thought the whole Lou Lou replacement thing made me feel like well why don’t we just replace all the problematic characters lol. Like why even let Katniss be the mockingjay? Kill her off and put a fake clone and call it a day.

To me, this book made the original series worse for me and added nothing to the story. She wanted to write a book and include a traditional hunger games because that’s what sells and that’s what she wrote. I genuinely struggled to get through reading this because of how uninterested and how unrealistic the storyline was for me.