Catching Fire

I finished The Hunger Games hoping against hope that the foreshadowed love triangle would not actually develop in Catching Fire. No such luck.

Overall, for me, Catching Fire just left something to be desired. The writing was the same mediocre style as the first book. This, of course, I expected; however, I still can't say that I enjoyed it any more than I did the first time. The one exception would be the cliff-hanger ending as it did give me some motivation to read the final book of the trilogy anyway.

The plot itself seemed to be in a hurry to go nowhere. As mentioned above, the love triangle irritated me. For a girl who mentions multiple times that she has no desire to marry or have children Katniss sure manages to shamelessly lead both boys on. In addition, more space was devoted to describing the food at the Capital Banquet than to describing the entire victory tour, hinted as a main plot point in the book description, after District 11; and the Quarter Quell seemed like an unnecessary repeat of the first book. Could the author really not think of anything else to move the story along besides throwing them back into the arena?

Catching Fire was not bad enough to keep me from reading Mockingjay, partly due to the ending.  However, overall, I found The Hunger Games to be the more enjoyable of the two.