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This was a very solid entry that built on the world and fleshed out Haymitch's character. I was invested in the narrative and found Haymitch believable and compelling. Maysilee was a "mean girl" archetype written sympathetically, which was uncommon and enjoyable. Downside here was a bit too much prequel syndrome: trying a little too hard to fit in things from the original books.

I've long thought the the world building parts and the anticipation in the leadup to the games were more interesting than the games themselves, and Collins apparently agrees. The games don't start until halfway through and only take up about 30% of the book. Even then, Haymitch spends the majority of them staying out of the action.

The drumbeat of Haymitch taking on an ally and then watching them die starts to seem repetitive and that he barely gets a chance to know them, but that's kind of the point. It reminded me of the movie The Iron Claw in that way.

This book was more mature but less subtle than the previous entries, which is an odd fit. The writing was aged up a little with the audience, but the themes were somehow even less subtle than the original books. The thesis is stated in the epigraph, then pounded in throughout the book.

The book includes a brief epilogue set after the main series and a sample chapter of the first Hunger Games book, which I don't like because it would be pretty funny if you read this with no knowledge of the other books. Ultimate downer ending.

The casting for the movie is amazing, and I'll be there opening weekend.

I was excited about this book because I expected it to be primarily about cults, but it was much more of a body horror/monster book.

The thing I look for in a work about cults in some understanding off why people joined the cult. Cults appeal to psychological vulnerabilities, and everyone has them. For, e.g., The People's Temple or Heaven's Gate, I primarily see the grave evil they did while still understanding what they offered and how they convinced people they were improving the world and themselves. The Angels are all stick and no carrot. I don't see what their members get out of it. I don't exactly need their systematic theology, but I need to know more about how they arrived at such an extreme belief and what's in it for the common person in the pews. A simple change here would be to make the Angels the only ones who had medication to survive the virus.

I don't know Andrew Joseph White's background, but the way he writes is like someone who grew up going to the downtown First Methodist church a few times a year, and maybe went to Six Flags America with the youth group. In other words, he writes like a person who's reasonably familiar with Christianity, but hasn't experienced or deeply researched religious trauma. The religious elements felt like a Hallowe'en costume for the villains.

This feels somewhat like a book from the 2000s. In that era it felt like religion was the cause of queerphobia. People had legitimately never (knowingly) met a queer person, and believed what their church told them. That feels out of place in the 2020s when religion is increasingly downstream of culture. A lot of people who identify as Evangelical never go to church. They have the regressive social views first and then identify with a religion to justify them.

I thought the body horror part was effective. I will have to think through and discuss how the monster/body horror theme relates to the trans experience.

The story of Revelation is a highly symbolic liberatory narrative about a minority religious group surviving under imperial occupation. Some modern Christians, primarily in America, misread it as a triumphalist story about God proving them right and torturing their enemies. There's a good novel in there about how we misperceive monsters in the same way, but I don't think this novel gets there. The thing I look for in a work about cults in some understanding off why people joined the cult.

I will have to think through how the body horror part relates to the trans experience.