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

13, they are able to talk in private for the first time since Katniss’ rescue, their conversation ultimately leads to a fight. Gale questions her defense of her prep team, recovering at that time under her mother’s care in the district’s medical center. Katniss tries to explain to him that they are simple in a child-like way—that they really cared for her—and that the penalty for stealing bread is not so very different from Gale’s whipping by Thread back home for hunting a turkey. Her arguments fall flat—even for herself. She feels Gale may be right; at the same time her heart tells her he is wrong.
    Gale’s next betrayal further ruptures Katniss’ sense of trust. After Katniss and Finnick accidently witness a devastating broadcast of Peeta’s second interview, Katniss waits for Gale to tell her about it. He never does—even though she asks—until eventually she forces him to admit that he knew about it. He lied to her by omission.
    By the time Gale and Beetee engineer the collapse of the mountain in District 2, Katniss sees that Gale has become—or
perhaps always was—someone whose compassion extends only to a small sphere of family and friends. Anyone, and as it turns out everyone —including, depending on how one reads the events at the end of Mockingjay , Prim—can be sacrificed to serve the greater good. Ends justify even the most amoral means. It is a true betrayal of all that motivates Katniss’ personal and eventually “public” life as the Mockingjay.
    Gale’s own knife-sharp sense of right and wrong gets increasingly blunted as the tale unfolds, until the one person Katniss trusted in the first book becomes someone whose heart and mind is closed to her by the end of the story.
The Peeta Factor
    Whereas Katniss’ early relationship with Gale is characterized by trust, her relationship with Peeta, in all three books, is characterized by mis trust. She must, from the beginning, see Peeta as an enemy—or at best, a wary, untrustworthy, temporary ally. Only one of them can win the Hunger Games; only one of them can come back alive.
    Katniss is accustomed to mistrust, and it is easy to turn it on Peeta. As she witnesses Peeta approaching their train to the Capitol in The Hunger Games all puffy-eyed and blotchy from crying, her reaction is swift, her judgment brutal: Is this part of his strategy? To appear weak and soft-hearted? Immediately she questions the reality of Peeta’s emotions; and through Katniss’ suspicion, Collins plants our own doubts. Is Peeta all about tactics, or is his open, good-hearted nature the real thing? Later on, is his declaration of love for Katniss during Cesar Flickerman’s interview for real—or part of some Machiavellian ability to scheme?
    Katniss’ suspicions, however, are not written in stone—far from it. One minute she is sure Peeta has allied himself with the
Careers to kill her; only a short time later when she is sick and disoriented from tracker jacker venom she realizes “Peeta Mellark just saved my life” ( The Hunger Games ).
    Before entering the arena for the first time, during the interview with Cesar Flickerman, Peeta catches her totally off guard when he declares shyly that the one girl he’s ever had a crush on is Katniss, the fellow tribute he will be compelled to kill if he wants to be the victor.
    Not only is she shocked, she’s furious. She actually shoves him when they are alone. But her anger and confusion mount exponentially when she learns that Haymitch and Peeta had discussed this whole approach before the interview: Peeta in love with Katniss. A brilliant strategy. But the idea that Peeta is telling the truth still haunts her. Does he actually care for her?
    As Haymitch reminds her in that same scene when she insists they are not star-crossed lovers, “Who cares? It’s all a big show. It’s how you’re perceived” ( The Hunger Games ).
    When it comes to something as personal as romance, Katniss instinctively recoils.