To all of you who’re reading Mockingjay – awesome! Have fun, guys!

To those still waiting, hold on tight guys, it’ll be with you in no time!

The Publishers Weekly has posted an even more spoilery review than the LA Times one . If you want to you can read it here. Beware, it has very minute details from the book!

Hyperventilation anyone?

Here’s Suzanne Collins thanking fans and reading from the first chapter of Mockingjay. Wanna go ahead or staying spoiler free? Your call – but here’s the vid:

Scholastic’s On Our Minds blog has released an interesting and informative video interview with Suzanne Collins where she answers the following five questions:

1) What can fans of the first two Hunger Games books expect in the sequel Mockingjay?
2) Are any of the characters based on people you know?
3) How do you typically plot/plan your books?
4) If you were chosen for the Hunger Games, what would your strategy be?
5) What’s on your mind?

Check out this awesome review of the Hunger Games Training Days Strategy Game from Black Gate.

The Hunger Games: Training Day is hard to describe. It’s a card-based strategy game where the Tributes work on their skills leading up to the arena. I watched the kids while my wife played this game and, afterward, she said that she wanted it. Really wanted it. Like “Buy this for me for Christmas!” wanted it. It was the only game we played that got that sort of reaction from her … so I guess we’ll be buying it soon.

Have you set your mind on it yet?

Rick Margolis from School Library Journal posted a nice, long interview with Suzanne. In this very intriguing interview, Suzanne talks about Katniss, her future, the Capitol and implies that President Snow’s blood-smelling breath is a secret to be revealed in the third book.

Suzanne also talks of how she hopes these books, where children are introduced to the concept of war, could initiate “better dialogues going on about it, and we would have a fuller understanding.”

Click on Read More to continue reading:

“Symbolically, I suppose, Katniss is something like a mockingjay in and of herself. She is a girl who should never have existed. And the reason she does exist is that she comes from District 12, which is sort of the joke of the 12 districts of Panem. The Capitol is lax there. The security is much less. The peacekeepers, who are the peacekeeping force, are still the law, and they’re still threatening, but they intermix more with the population in District 12 than they do in other districts. And also things like the fence that surrounds 12 isn’t electrified full time.

Because of these lapses in security and the Capitol just thinking that 12 is not ever really going to be a threat because it’s small and poor, they create an environment in which Katniss develops, in which she is created, this girl who slips under this fence, which isn’t electrified, and learns to be a hunter. Not only that, she’s a survivalist, and along with that goes a degree of independent thinking that is unusual in the districts.”

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