Signed
Catching Fire
Signed first printing, 2009
Catching Fire (2009) is the second novel in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series. It begins several months after Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark's dual victory in the 74th Hunger Games. President Snow arrives at Katniss's home in District 12 to deliver a private warning: the districts have interpreted her berries stunt as an act of defiance, and unless Katniss can convincingly sell the fiction of a love-struck girl who simply could not bear to lose Peeta, the rebellion already stirring in the outlying districts will be attributed to her, and she and everyone she loves will pay for it. The novel's central event is the 75th Hunger Games, a Quarter Quell, in which the Capitol announces that tributes will be drawn from each district's existing pool of victors. This returns Katniss and Peeta to the arena, this time alongside experienced, hardened survivors.
Signed copy. This copy is signed by Collins on the half-title page (not stamped).
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, boards. New York: Scholastic Press, 2009. Indies Choice Book Award winner (2010). ISBN: 9780439023498. #10601.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Signed copy. This copy is signed by Collins on the half-title page (not stamped).
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, boards. New York: Scholastic Press, 2009. Indies Choice Book Award winner (2010). ISBN: 9780439023498. #10601.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
Catching Fire takes its title from Collins' own metaphor for what happens when a symbol of resistance, once created, cannot be easily extinguished. The novel opens with Katniss hunting in the woods outside District 12, the same practiced routine from the first book, but the landscape around her has changed. Her family has moved into a house in the Victor's Village, a cluster of large, empty homes that districts keep ready for the rare event of a surviving tribute. The neighborhood is a monument to absence. Katniss and Haymitch Abernathy, the district's only other living victor, are its sole residents. The material comfort is real, but so is its isolation.
President Snow's visit to Katniss's home early in the novel is one of the more quietly menacing sequences of the series. He arrives without ceremony, sits in her kitchen, drinks her tea, and makes his position clear without raising his voice. He explains that he knows the love story between Katniss and Peeta was at least partly performance, because he is not stupid, and that her performance was not convincing enough. The uprisings in Districts 8 and 11 are already underway. He needs her to continue the performance, more convincingly, or he will eliminate the problem by other means. The conversation establishes Snow not as a cartoon authoritarian but as a man who understands the symbolic nature of power very precisely.
The Victory Tour, which Katniss and Peeta are required to complete before the 75th Games, takes them through every district in order. Each stop requires a scripted speech of gratitude to the district for its fallen tribute. In District 11, home of Rue and Thresh, Katniss departs from her script to speak directly about the two children who died in the arena, and the crowd responds with the three-finger salute from District 12. The district's Peacekeepers immediately execute an elderly man on the stage for instigating a public demonstration. This sequence is important because it shows the Capitol's repressive response outpacing its public-relations strategy. Snow is trying to manage Katniss as a symbol while simultaneously deploying the kind of overt violence that makes symbols necessary.
The Quarter Quell announcement, that the 75th Games will draw victors as tributes, is revealed as a pre-planned manipulation. Quarter Quells are supposedly determined by sealed envelopes written at the founding of the Games, but the implication throughout the novel is that the envelope was forged or its contents adjusted to achieve the desired result, specifically the death of Katniss. The arena for the 75th Games is constructed around a clock, with each segment of the arena cycling through a different environmental hazard on a predictable schedule: lightning, blood rain, poisonous fog, carnivorous monkeys, tidal waves. The design is elaborate and murderous, and Katniss spends most of the Games learning to read its patterns.
The revelation at the end is that several of the other victors in the arena were part of a coordinated resistance network and that the Quell itself had been infiltrated. When the arena is destroyed from within, Katniss is extracted by a hovercraft organized by the districts and District 13, a district the Capitol had declared destroyed decades ago but which had survived underground. Peeta ends up captured by the Capitol, but the rebellion is underway. Catching Fire is where the pivots from a story about individual survival into a collective uprising.
President Snow's visit to Katniss's home early in the novel is one of the more quietly menacing sequences of the series. He arrives without ceremony, sits in her kitchen, drinks her tea, and makes his position clear without raising his voice. He explains that he knows the love story between Katniss and Peeta was at least partly performance, because he is not stupid, and that her performance was not convincing enough. The uprisings in Districts 8 and 11 are already underway. He needs her to continue the performance, more convincingly, or he will eliminate the problem by other means. The conversation establishes Snow not as a cartoon authoritarian but as a man who understands the symbolic nature of power very precisely.
The Victory Tour, which Katniss and Peeta are required to complete before the 75th Games, takes them through every district in order. Each stop requires a scripted speech of gratitude to the district for its fallen tribute. In District 11, home of Rue and Thresh, Katniss departs from her script to speak directly about the two children who died in the arena, and the crowd responds with the three-finger salute from District 12. The district's Peacekeepers immediately execute an elderly man on the stage for instigating a public demonstration. This sequence is important because it shows the Capitol's repressive response outpacing its public-relations strategy. Snow is trying to manage Katniss as a symbol while simultaneously deploying the kind of overt violence that makes symbols necessary.
The Quarter Quell announcement, that the 75th Games will draw victors as tributes, is revealed as a pre-planned manipulation. Quarter Quells are supposedly determined by sealed envelopes written at the founding of the Games, but the implication throughout the novel is that the envelope was forged or its contents adjusted to achieve the desired result, specifically the death of Katniss. The arena for the 75th Games is constructed around a clock, with each segment of the arena cycling through a different environmental hazard on a predictable schedule: lightning, blood rain, poisonous fog, carnivorous monkeys, tidal waves. The design is elaborate and murderous, and Katniss spends most of the Games learning to read its patterns.
The revelation at the end is that several of the other victors in the arena were part of a coordinated resistance network and that the Quell itself had been infiltrated. When the arena is destroyed from within, Katniss is extracted by a hovercraft organized by the districts and District 13, a district the Capitol had declared destroyed decades ago but which had survived underground. Peeta ends up captured by the Capitol, but the rebellion is underway. Catching Fire is where the pivots from a story about individual survival into a collective uprising.
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