Snail Spirals

What’s the best way to attract the attention of an 11 year old girl, who is upstairs and apparently ignoring my calls to come down for dinner?

Whistle Katniss’s four-note mockingjay song (from the Hunger Games) at the bottom of the stairs.  She came running and peered wide-eyed down at me.

I giggled at her for a solid 10 minutes.

Seriously, though, I think she has gotten more out of this series than just the adventure story. Emma’s class read the first book of the series in school, and watched the movie.  She then proceeded to devour the last two books on her own initiative, and we watched the movies together after she was done reading.  She finished the third book in time for us to go to the matinee of Mockingjay Part 1 on Sunday.  I read these books a few years ago, and watched the first two movies when they came out on Netflix. It's great that Emma’s growing up enough for us to go to the theater together for the last two.

She’s been all about Katniss this fall, and this sixth grader has made some very astute comments on recent world events. At various points over the past month she has talked to me, with understanding and insight, about how a dystopian society can form following a war or plague, about how oppression of a group of people by a privileged upper class leads to disaster, and how Katniss, Harry Potter, and Luke Skywalker have proved that ordinary people can change the world.