The Girl Who Was on Fire by Diana Peterfreund, Carrie Ryan, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Leah Wilson, Terri Clark, Blythe Woolston Read Free Book Online Page A

people. She cried really hard at the end of Mockingjay .

SMOKE AND MIRRORS
    Reality vs. Unreality in the Hunger Games
    ELIZABETH M. REES
     
     
    Imagine living in a world where you can’t trust anyone—not your neighbors, not your friends—and you’re never alone or safe—not in the woods, not in your home, not at your job. Or just think about what it would be like to grow up in Panem. In such a world, the only way to survive is by learning to see through the deceptions that surround you and figure out how to use them to your own advantage. Here, Elizabeth M. Rees takes us through the layers of smoke and mirrors in the Hunger Games series and the challenges Katniss faces in her pursuit of truth.

    smoke and mirrors: cover-up; something that is intended to draw attention away from something else that somebody would prefer remain unnoticed
    —Encarta World English Dictionary
     
smoke and mirrors: irrelevant or misleading information serving to obscure the truth of a situation
    —Collins English Dictionary
     
     
    W hen I was a kid my favorite game was “Let’s Pretend.” Every child plays one version or another. You create a world for a day, or an afternoon, complete with rules, with adventures, with tragedies and silly happenings, everything from tea parties to out-and-out galactic warfare. But then your mom calls you in for dinner, or to do chores or homework, and game time ends. Poof! The pretend world evaporates into thin air, never to exist in exactly the same way again.
    But what if it never vanished? What if all that pretense, that make-believe, wasn’t imaginary at all? What if your whole world, day-in and day-out, was made up of pretense, lies, and deceit? What if your life or your death depended on rules that change on a whim? What if to survive at all, you too have to learn to play a game of smoke and mirrors—to master a game constructed of lies, one that you can never control?
    Katniss Everdeen, in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series, is forced to do just that. Even as Katniss is engulfed in ever more vicious treachery, sinister tricks, and heartbreaking betrayals,
her hero’s task is to penetrate the smoke and mirrors that delude herself and others until she can at last distinguish the real from the unreal, both in her own life and in Panem.

Homeschooled in Deception
    At the beginning of the first book we are introduced to the convolutions of survival in Panem through Katniss’ daily struggles in District 12. The government masquerades as some kind of democracy: it does sport a president, albeit one with dictatorial powers. 3 In Big Brother style, the Capitol suppresses any kind of dissent, behind the guise, of course, of “protecting” its citizens. Services that could ease the difficult lives of the residents are meted out according to each district’s usefulness to the Capitol (electricity is sporadic, at least in the least-favored districts). Within each district resources are never fairly distributed in the markets frequented by the general public. Fuel and food are doled out in amounts that barely sustain the populace. Only the elite of each district, and mainly of the Capitol, benefit from the grueling labor of Panem’s citizens.
    The government’s heavy hand hovers over the districts as it metes out draconian punishment for the smallest of offenses: illegal hunting merits a public whipping and/or time in the stocks, and even casual comments against the government lead to death—or to life—as an Avox, rendered mute and forced to
live a life of slavery serving the wealthy denizens of the Capitol. To police its citizens the Capitol eavesdrops: during the first rebellion, it used muttations like the jabberjays, which could mimic human speech, to parrot back to the authorities everything they heard. Since then the government has employed alternate means mysterious to Katniss, but which we later learn include phone tapping. 4 To insure that no one forgets the price of an uprising all