Last time on Mockingjay, Prim is the antichrist.

What will break me?
This is the question that consumes me over the next three days as we wait to be released from our prison of safety. What will break me into a million pieces so that I am beyond repair, beyond usefulness? I mention it to no one, but it devours my waking hours and weaves itself throughout my nightmares.

See, the Prim antichrist theory was right. Katniss, in answer to your question, what will break you is obsessively thinking of this.

We’re told they get short periods to socialize with each other. Considering they’re in a giant room full of scared people, I can’t think of how enforcing the no-socialize rule works the rest of the time.

Katniss says their area is very popular because of Buttercup. I can see that, he’s apparently the only interesting thing down there, and most of the people have probably never even seen a cat.

game of Crazy Cat. I created this by accident a few years ago, during a winter blackout. You simply wiggle a flashlight beam around on the floor, and Buttercup tries to catch it.

Wait. District 12 has, at best, a couple hours of electricity a day. They can’t have blackouts, because to have blackouts requires electricity in the first place. And their main cause of death was starvation. Since when do they have flashlights to play with?

I’m even issued a special set of batteries–an enormous waste–to be used for this purpose.

And her continued passive aggressive whining at 13’s resource management makes no sense in that context. She shouldn’t have ever had batteries to waste.

Also, I’d assume 13 uses rechargeable batteries, for practical reasons. And for things like flashlights they’d probably use those shake to recharge models.

Then Katniss explains how this game is a metaphor for everything she’s going through with the uncatchable light. God, first we had the song explained and now this? At this rate by the end of the book every other paragraph will be explaining the meaning of the preceding one.

Thinking that Peeta was in his possession and being tortured for rebel information was
bad. But thinking that he’s being tortured specifically to incapacitate me is unendurable. And it’s under the weight of this revelation that I truly begin to break.

Step one of Prim’s plan is complete.

Katniss talks more about the pain in her heart. I’ve never felt pain in my heart over anything. At most, general chest area, but mostly it’s centered more in the gut, where you have more nerves to get confused by stress and start sending bad signals.

So she goes to talk to Finnick about her problems again because she understands him now. This understanding takes the form of a conversation revolving around her again.

you do love him. I’m not saying in what way. Maybe you don’t know yourself.

I find this interesting because it’s not like this book is going for anything but romantic love here. We had a familial relationship in the beginning of the first book and a friendship during the Rue period. After that, it’s been all romance, all the time. So why even talk about it like this? I see this kind of line every now and again, and it’s odd when you think about it. It only ever seems to crop up in works where there’s only one kind of love. Either the character turns out to be in Real Love with the other one, or they love them in “another way” and the relationship is promptly sidelined.

She asks crazy nopants how he handles it, and he points out he doesn’t, as Katniss already knows. Of course, he does this in a rather flowery way, which kind of undercuts his claims of not being able to think straight.

“I don’t, Katniss! Obviously, I don’t. I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there’s no relief in waking.”

See, when I read this, I don’t think “depressed and miserable”. I think “emo douche in love with his own pain”. Severely depressed people are not finding poetic ways to construct sentences. Severely depressed people are not necessarily even capable of sentences.

I think the real problem is that everyone’s dialogue is the same. Finnick and Prim sound pretty much the same, it was just a little less noticeable because he’s an adult. What’s weird here is usually similar dialogue is an issue because an author’s relatively good at writing clever lines, but can’t vary their style. Here the dialogue is all awful.

So he gives her his rope to tie knots in like he’s doing. Eh.

Someone has finally broken out the coffee–although I’m sure it’s viewed only as an emergency stimulant

Why do they even have coffee? Either they make it or they don’t. And if they want an emergency stimulant, surely it’d be more productive to make actual stimulant pills or drinks you could distribute easily?

The best explanation I can think of is they do have coffee, but they can’t make enough to keep up with demand because of the influx of 12 refugees, so they cut it for everyone for the moment, because 13 is all about equality.

“What day is it?” I ask no one in particular. Boggs tells me September begins next week. September. That means Snow has had Peeta in his clutches for five, maybe six weeks.

…but the reaping is done in spring. Then there’s a couple days in the capital and right into the games. This time, the games didn’t even last a week. So somehow we started in spring and six weeks later, it’s almost September. Unless this is a clue that the climate is really messed up, it seems like a plot hole.

For some reason, Katniss gets to go above ground and check out the bomb holes.

We come to our first crater, thirty yards wide and I can’t tell how deep. Very. Boggs says anyone on the first ten levels would likely have been killed.
…
Before the bombing, very little of the current 13 was aboveground. A few guard stations. The training area. About a foot of the top floor of our building–where Buttercup’s window jutted out–with several feet of steel on top of it. Even that was never meant to withstand more than a superficial attack.

This raises another point. Why do they build near the surface anyway? They’ve already built down well below the area a missile can reach, why make things higher up where they’re vulnerable?

It turns out I’m wrong about invisible missiles, and 13’s radar did pick up the approach. Peeta just gave them an extra ten minutes. But Katniss says that Prim was only in the bunkers a couple minutes before the bombing. From the description, it certainly seems like there was a pretty reasonable lag time between her arrival and the first bombs. Even if there wasn’t, the bombs were distant to those in the bunker, so Prim still wouldn’t have been in much danger even if she hadn’t made it all the way down.

They see a bunch of roses Snow left and Katniss flips out. Apparently no one else knows of Snow’s whole rose theme? That kind of defeats the point of having a theme.

Then it’s time for Katniss to give a speech but suddenly she loses it.

My voice cuts off in a dry, squeaking sound.
“Try the line again,” says Cressida. “‘Thirteen’s alive and well and so am I.'”

So it’s okay to say lines when it’s good!Director feeding her them.

But she can’t get the words out.

“What’s wrong with her?” Plutarch says under his breath.
“She’s figured out how Snow’s using Peeta,” says Finnick.

Katniss is officially the dumbest person to ever live for this to be a recent revelation.

There’s something like a collective sigh of regret from the semicircle of people spread out before me. Because I know this now. Because there will never be a way for me to not know this again. Because, beyond the military disadvantage losing a Mockingjay entails, I am broken.

I’m pretty sure the collective sign was more an “oh god, now she’s going to be melodramatic for another month” sigh. Also, that final line doesn’t even make sense.

Katniss cries for a bit and they drug her into unconsciousness, because apparently the book thinks that’s just how you deal with everything. Really, book?

When she wakes up she learns there’s a rescue team sent out to get back her precious millstone.

Katniss asks why they didn’t just do that originally, and Haymitch says because it’s costly.

“Covers will be blown. People may die. But keep in mind that they’re dying every day.

What?

People are currently dying in a war, so it’s okay to get a bunch more people killed?

This is absolutely awful. It’s literally saying it’s okay for a dozen people to get killed just for the chance of rescuing one, because he’s more important than they are. And it’s worth losing all sorts of spies. Even if blowing their cover isn’t fatal, they’re no longer there to help others. The information they were learning was saving people’s lives. Katniss is gushing over the ten minutes of advanced warning Peeta managed, imagine how much they were doing.

One of those expendable people happens to be Boggs, because clearly the second in command of the people leading the war is the sort of person you should risk for Millstone. And the other, of course, is Gale.

I don’t actually buy that. Sure, it’d seem convenient for the losing member of the love triangle to die and remove himself, but if he dies like this he’ll always be linked to Peeta’s winning the triangle. That kind of thing is for stories with a smidgeon of depth, enough to acknowledge the existence of other people as more than props. I’m still assuming Gale is doomed (unless a replacement love interest pops up soon) but it’ll be a death Peeta can’t be blamed for.