Road Trip Wednesday: Best Book in August (very mild spoilage)

YA Highway and friends are at it again for Road Trip Wednesday.

Road Trip Wednesday is a "Blog Carnival," where YA Highway's contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on our own blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.

This week's topic:What's the best book you read this month (August)?

I had to laugh this morning when I logged onto Blogger and saw all the posts for Road Trip Wednesday that featured a graphic of Mockingjay, the final installment in the Hunger Games trilogy. Most people that got it on the release date read it in a few days, so I knew it would figure prominently in this topic!

I want to cast my vote for Catching Fire, the second book in the series. I did read it for the first time in August; I read Hunger Games last year and I wanted to wait to read Catching Fire until all 3 were out. So about a week before the Mockingjay release, I re-read HG and then read CF.

I loved the twist in the games that features so prominently in Catching Fire. As a reader, it made me so fired up (had to say it) on behalf of Katniss and the other surviving tributes. As a writer, my mind was spinning at a million miles an hour with all the things you could do with that situation, all the different directions you could take the characters and the districts.

And I was perfectly satisfied with the choices Suzanne Collins made for CF, but I think the biggest reason why I have more affection for CF than I do for Mockingjay is the feeling of hope that it ends with. I've already posted on the violence in the last book so I won't repeat all that here, other than to say I thought the ending was true to the book and the world Collins created. I thought CF ended on a "We can do it!" note, and Mockingjay ended on a "We survived it!" note.

Both valid and true experiences, but it will be a while before I can go back and re-read Mockingjay again.