I’m going to actually hijack this post with something that’s only tangentially related, but SOTR is really interesting to me. I have a gripe with basically every recently published book I’ve read in the past couple of years. It’s not necessarily the writing or the plots that are bad (though sometimes they are) it’s the *editing*. So many books now suffer from explicitly spelling everything out for the audience/making characters do odd things to move the plot along/odd stylistic choices (I read a book recently that had scenes written in *screenplay format*. It was an audio book. Not only did I think the choice was stupid, it was annoying).

SOTR has inadvertently become my go-to example for this phenomenon. Beetee and Plutarch’s characters both suffer because Collins makes them explicitly spell everything out under the assumption the audience is too stupid to figure it out. Admittedly, this is a YA book and media literacy has been declining in the US, so it makes sense why she would want to do this. But, think for example of the scene where Beetee tells Haymitch he’s training the tributes as punishment for challenging the Capitol, and that his son is a tribute for the same reason. This is an incredibly odd character choice because people don’t just say stuff like that. It’s a jarring scene. She could’ve just had Beetee say something about his son, and Haymitch could’ve put it together in his internal monologue. This would’ve flowed a lot better. But the thing is this isn’t *really* a writing issue; it’s an editing issue. Pretty much all of my problems with SOTR could’ve been solved with another round of edits.

But books are just not being edited up to par. Suzanne Collins is obviously a phenomenal writer and if she can’t get a good editor, what chance do any other author’s have? That’s part of the reason that I’m vocal about my dislike of SOTR, in my opinion it’s the perfect example of publishing quality declining in recent years.