My heart has been ripped out, shredded, trodden on and broken. My fucking god, this book.

Up until this, Catching Fire was my favourite book of the series with Mockingjay being a close second. This is now my favourite book of the series by a long shot.

It's the most brutal, depressing and bleak book in the series by quite a long shot. The characters are fantastic and the development of known characters makes sense however. I was surprised to see so many known names but it does all slot together so lovely! The game was not as complex as some other arenas but it was pretty clever 😄

But yeah, I know it's hunger games so everyone expects death and gore and brutality and classism and everything like that, but this really is evil this book. I'm honestly curious to how the movie will sanitise this down, especially since they do seem to censor a fair bit. Cause there's no way in hell if this was faithfully put into live action, it'd just get a 12 rating. And with how political it is, it's way more political and explicitly so too. And I love it for that.

Suzanne's anger is burning bright and I've gone from thinking maybe this was being milked a bit too much with songbirds & snakes to now properly believing that there is more world-building that can still be done.

Incredible characters, gripping first half - slowly slips more and more away however the further into the book it goes with the slower the pace gets.

Honestly really love the concept and how the characters wrapped around each other and the story. I love the idea of language, but despite that part of it being what partially sold me on the book is was incredibly lacking overall. There was bits and bobs of it, but not really that much at all, and I don't even really recall any written Japanese?

Another underused part I think was Thaniel's synaesthesia. It's thrown in a couple of times, and has a couple important moments, but generally it was just a very background thing. I don't think I've ever read a book where the MC has synaesthesia before and I was super interested in that side of things.. only for it to feel like the author forgot about that point at times 😅 Also got confusing when the same descriptions of sounds were used by another character at one point?

The whole terrorism thing was very good in the first half, it felt like it was gonna expand out a lot more and involve a lot more... but then during the second half it just became, well, nothing? and then mixed in with another character which made it just confusing. And then the ending made it redundant a fair bit.

I want to like this more than I do, and there was I would say more fun parts than not. I just don't think it came together very well at all and feels overall incredibly disjointed. It's trying to be so many stories in one, and kinda doesn't really connect them all up fully enough.