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

Although she is sixteen at the start of the trilogy, she has never given any conscious thought to romance. 7 And then there is Gale back home, rooting for her and at the same time witness to Peeta’s televised declaration. Katniss can’t help but wonder about the effect on him, which makes her begin to wonder about her own feelings—and yet, as Haymitch says, it’s all just an act, and one that serves her well.
    However, this act becomes even more difficult to pull off in Catching Fire . After Snow dictates the course of her future with
Peeta, Peeta himself throws another wrench into the works. He announces she is pregnant. Katniss is horrified, and yet has to play along—and then realizes of course that this gives her another advantage both in the arena and with sponsors. While Katniss is expert at negotiating deceptions to achieve her aims, Peeta, like Haymitch, is expert at achieving his aims by creating them. 8
    To further complicate matters, Katniss is not sure of her own feelings. Is she falling in love? By the end of Catching Fire , neither we nor she is sure. But Katniss has finally come to a place where she trusts his feelings if nothing else. Which is, naturally, when she learns she cannot—when a rescued Peeta turns out to have been hijacked and does not love her at all anymore, his memories manipulated into cruel versions of reality in which Katniss is his enemy.
    The whole series, and Peeta and Katniss’ entire relationship, is fraught with the challenge of distinguishing reality from unreality, but Peeta’s hijacking may best illustrate the overriding conundrum of the series. Not only can Katniss not trust Peeta, but Peeta cannot even trust himself.
    In District 13 they remain largely separated as Peeta is treated, but when the rebels invade the Capitol, Coin sends Peeta into battle alongside Katniss. His better self has been partially reclaimed, but he is still unable to tell real memories from altered ones and is still unstable, with unpredictable violent outbursts—all aimed at Katniss.
    Though he is heavily guarded, Katniss remains wary. One minute his behavior is normal; the next minute it is lethal. Katniss’ own feelings swing wildly: Can she trust him or not? Peeta’s
untrustworthiness is Snow’s fault, not his own, but that doesn’t change the reality that if Katniss guesses wrong at any moment and lets down her guard, she could die.
    Her eventual reclamation of their friendship begins with a game of “Real or Not Real”—a poignantly explicit version of the game the two of them have been playing all along. Through it, they are able to find their way back to each other, until, just prior to the epilogue, when Peeta asks: “‘You love me. Real or not real?’” Katniss is at last able to tell him, “‘Real’” ( Mockingjay ).

Katniss: Know Yourself, Be Yourself
    The reason this exchange is so important is that, of all the people Katniss feels she cannot trust, at various times and in various ways, during the course of the series, the most important is herself.
    Smoke and fog—literal and figurative—engulf Katniss throughout the Hunger Games. Toxic fogs in the arena and oily miasmas that fill the alleys and streets of the Capitol battleground threaten her very survival. But the hardest to penetrate is her own blindness: she cannot read the state of her heart. What does she feel? And for whom?
    One or two feelings are perfectly clear to her: 9 Her unequivocal
love for Prim. Her hatred of President Snow. Perhaps one can also add in a more general way her deep sense of the immorality and horror of the Games.
    What makes Katniss a compelling heroine is that she is a bundle of contradictions. She’s a pro at hiding her feelings beneath a stony, angry exterior; at the same time she’s a terrible actress. Whenever she has to “perform”—to sell herself—to an audience, she’s a flop. It’s Cinna who tells her from the outset to “be herself,” to “be honest”—Cinna’s