The Girl Who Was on Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

to the other characters in the book, Katniss isn’t The Girl Who Chose Peeta. She’s not The Mockingjay or The Girl on Fire or The Girl Who Didn’t Choose Gale.
    She’s a girl who survives something horrible and loses far too many people along the way.
    There’s an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I’ve been thinking about a lot while writing this essay. In it, Buffy sacrifices her own life to save her sister, and right before she does, she tells her sister that the hardest thing to do in the world is to live—ironic words coming from someone about to kill herself for the greater good. As I’m writing this, I just keep thinking that Katniss never gets to sacrifice herself. She doesn’t get the heroic death. She survives—and that leaves her doing the
hardest thing in the world: living in it once so many of the ones that she loves are gone.
    The very last we see of Katniss in Mockingjay is an epilogue in which she’s still struggling with that, even as we learn that she’s come full circle and given birth to a new family. Some people probably read that epilogue and think, “Okay, so Katniss chose Peeta and they had kids. The End.” I read it and think that Katniss chose to go on—again. She chose to love—again. She’s scarred, but she survived—and she loves her children just as fiercely as she loved Prim.
    That’s who Katniss is, underneath all of the masks—and if we’re picking teams, I’m on hers.

    JENNIFER LYNN BARNES is the author of seven books for young adults, including Tattoo , Fate , the Squad series, and Raised by Wolves , a paranormal adventure about a human girl raised by werewolves. Jen graduated from Yale University in 2006 with a degree in cognitive science and Cambridge University in 2007 with a master’s in psychiatry. She’s currently hard at work on a PhD.

YOUR HEART IS A WEAPON THE SIZE OF YOUR FIST
    Love as a Political Act in the Hunger Games
    MARY BORSELLINO
     
     
    We see some really memorable weapons in the Hunger Games series. The wolf mutts with the eyes of the dead tributes in The Hunger Games stand out, as does Katniss’ bow. There are Gale’s snares, as effective at trapping people as animals, and of course the multitude of horrors contained in the Capitol’s pods in Mockingjay . For Mary Borsellino, though, none of these even come close to the most powerful weapon in the series: love.

     
     
    T here’s a piece of graffiti on a wall in Palestine. Over the years since it was painted, it’s been photographed by scores of travelers and journalists. It reads:
    Your heart is a weapon the size of your fist. Keep fighting. Keep loving.
    More than bombs, fire, guns or arrows, love is the most powerful weapon in the Hunger Games. It stirs and feeds the rebellion. It saves the doomed. It destroys the bereaved. And it gives even the most devastated survivors a reason to go on.
    “Love” is not synonymous with “passion”. Hatred is also a passionate emotion. When I say “love” here, I mean compassion, loyalty, empathy, and the bonds of friendship, family, and romance. All these things are present in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series. So too are greed, selfishness, hatred, and fear. That the protagonists are able to put stock in love, even while given so many reasons to hate, is what gives the Hunger Games a note of hope despite the suffering of the characters.
    The Hunger Games is part of a genre of post-apocalyptic political fiction, the best known example of which is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four . Suzanne Collins has said that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book she reads over and over again, 1 and the Hunger Games shows a great debt to Orwell’s novel and to subsequent variations on it such as the graphic novel V for Vendetta .

    Both the Hunger Games and Nineteen Eighty-Four pit the power of hate versus the power of love. In Nineteen Eighty-Four , it’s hate that ultimately triumphs, but the Hunger Games—which is American, as opposed to