This review applies to the entire trilogy. I am struggling to write this review. I gave this series the highest rating I can, but it doesn't seem high enough. I have not been affected so profoundly, so completely, by a story since... Well maybe never. 
 From start to finish, this story is riveting, suspenseful, beautiful, and heart-wrenching. Like the Mockingjay itself, it is a dark, unique creature with its own song. It is dark in a way that nothing else in the genre is, a way that is real and perfect. Somehow within the grim framework of this world Collins has created, she captures every human emotion with ease: fear, anger, sadness, hope, and love, and tells a story of social justice that will make you want to revolt. 
 It is perfectly original, a perfectly believable world so different, yet so very much the same as our own. It has its own set of symbols as rich and complex as the real world. The plot is set in motion by the world itself, masterfully crafted, and then propelled forward by the many full characters and their complex motivations. Even the most minor of characters that we see for only a few pages manages to feel real, complete, and this is so dangerous in a book about war and hardship. We know in the beginning, certainly, that they cannot all make it to the end unscathed. But we read on anyway, rooting for them till the last. 
 The love triangle in theory would be almost an afterthought; they are fighting for their lives every moment of this story, who has time for love? But it becomes a driving force for all three of them, and eventually decides their fates. It is an integral part of the plot, not an add-on, or worse, the focus of the story, like so much of this genre. The ending for each of them was both the best and the worst part. (I only say worst because I cried like a small child and had to find my cat to hug.) Katniss makes the right choice, I'll just leave it at that. 
 I feel like I should warn you. This story broke my heart. When I walked away from two days of feverish reading, I almost felt numb. So long had my emotions been on overdrive through every minute of the trilogy that the world I live in seems small and dull in comparison. If I didn't have an outlet, I would still write this review just to sort through the emotions. 
 I loved Katniss Everdeen from the start, as a fellow child that had to grow up too quickly, take on too much, saw too much pain before she even knew who she was. And Peeta Mellark enthralled me with his refusal to let his humanity be taken from him, his strength to let love be his only motivation, even beyond survival. Gale Hawthorne pulled me in with his enigmatic unpredictability, his demand for justice at any cost, and his inability to give up, ever. Nevermind all the secondary characters that I wanted to fight to protect myself: Prim, Rue, Cinna, Finnick, even old drunk Haymitch. But they can all break your heart. 
 Your instinct when I tell you this is probably to try not to get attached to them, to let them exist as a fiction, just characters on the page. If you can even manage that when you read this, please don't. Let them get under your skin, in your heart, feel their pain, their loss, their hope, their love. There is justice in the world, theirs and ours. Let them motivate you to find it. 
 I've always been a bit of a revolutionary at heart. I think that happens to kids and teens that recognize and experience injustice early. Like Gale, I've been ranting about social reform since I can remember, wanting to tear down the walls of the metaphorical Capitol. But it comes at a price. On this, Collins pulls no punches, sacrifices no realism to spare her audience. Revolution is bloody. Gale takes it much better than I do. 
 But there's always the dandelion in the spring, blooming through the snow and hardship, the hope we can never put back in the proverbial box, the spark that will keep humanity striving for freedom and justice until they grind the last of us under their bootheels. And like Katniss, that dandelion is all we really need to survive.