I have to say, this is probably my favorite of the three novels. Sure, I went in with some very specific expectations (for instance, I was sure Peeta would be dead before the final pages), and though Mockingjay subverted almost all of the things I thought were coming, it more than compensated for the disappointment of being wrong.
I've heard a lot of grumblings from readers who feel that this book was a letdown, that it didn't end the way they hoped and expected, and from the first pages I was determined to figure out why. The prose of Mockingjay is better than that of Catching Fire right off the bat-- it isn't bogged down by recapping what happened or by re-outlining the dynamics between characters. Instead, it does what any final book in a series should do, jumping right into the action and expecting readers to be fully apprised of the situation.
What sets Mockingjay apart from its two predecessors is that it's much more of a war-time kind of novel. By that I mean events have conspired and collapsed in such a way that the characters have no choice but to prepare for, and agonize over, the impending and unavoidable battle for Panem. I think if you aren't the type to enjoy scene after scene of drawn out, tension-filled action, then you might not be able to stomach the majority of the book's middle, part of which has us literally following Katniss and company on a seemingly doomed trek across the capitol, but the payoff is every bit as dramatic and emotional as one could hope.
[SPOILER ALERT, if you hadn't figured it out already]
I have to say, I was shocked by the choice to kill off not Peeta, not even Gale, but Prim. I was shocked for about ten seconds before realizing that not only had it been in the making since the first novel, it was necessary to nearly all the characters involved. That's not to say her death, the sheer brutality of it and Katniss' almost catatonic grief, wasn't absolutely awful, but from a writing standpoint it amplifies Prim's significance and pushes the story to an end it might not have otherwise reached.
Prim's presence in the first two novels is almost exclusively in mentions and reminiscinces from Katniss, which relegates her to the role of supporting player. Yes, she is the impetus that pushes Katniss into volunteering for the Hunger Games, but we don't get to know her as a person quite as well as we'd like. Prim, in both her short life and her death, is a symbol of the lost innocence (because, you know, the pile of corpses racked up in the annual fight-to-the-death tournament isn't metaphor enough) of this post-post-modern world. She's not just someone who becomes a casualty of the barbarians in charge of Panem; she's someone we know, someone who has and would never hurt a fly, and someone the main character loves with absolutely no conditions. It is this third reason that illuminates why Prim has to be the one to die to push Katniss to the edge; if Peeta died she might have settled for finding solace in Gale or numbed her grief with the memory of his anger toward her in this book; if it had been Gale, something similar in the reverse might have happened. Katniss loses the one person she has always loved more than anyone else, and it is this which allows her to emerge as the heroine she's been training to become.
Oh, and there's also an epilogue that rivals Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for cheesiness (though this one is mercifully shorter), which reveals that Katniss ends up with Peeta. I predicted this all the way back in book one, but it's nice to be proven correct. What makes the presence of this epilogue tolerable, though, is the fact that after all Katniss (and we, the readers who've followed her journey) has been through, it just doesn't matter that much which suitor she chooses. Gale, who in my opinion was never really a contender, falls off her radar due to his possible hand in what happened to Prim, and Peeta happens to be there to try and pick up the pieces. Though the epilogue might make fans who've been "shipping" this romance all along cheer, for me (and for Katniss, I think), it's a bit sad. Yes, she's got a family and no, they aren't in the immediate danger she faced growing up, but the price paid was so high it's hard to really enjoy it.
I realize I've left out a considerable chunk of the plot from the book's middle in this review, and that's honestly because for me it doesn't race along in the same exciting, tightly paced way the previous two stories did. In reading Mockingjay I was primarily interested in how Suzanne Collins would take this tale, with so many loose ends and moving parts at book two's end, and conclude the series in a way that was satisfactory. I think for me it all hinges on what happens with Prim, and like Katniss I find that much of the rest of it grows hazy by story's end.
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