I've heard a lot of complaints about Suzanne Collins' Mockingjay. I've heard that it's too fast-paced, too many deaths, too much unnecessary gruesome, that Katniss is too focused on killing and surviving and not focused on emotional growth or something stupid like that.
But mainly that there are two many deaths.
You know what? Have a Suzanne Collins quote.
This is not a fairy tale. It’s a war, and in war, there are tragic losses that must be mourned.
Yes, lovelies, this is a series about a war. It's not like the Harry Potter series, where the focus of the story is about the triumph of love over hatred. (Though I think anybody who argues that the deaths at the end of Harry Potter were unnecessary is stupid, because that is also the end of a war, and people die.) This is about the fact that people die for no reason, or for stupid reasons, or for great reasons.
People die in Mockingjay not because it's convenient for a story, or emotional development for the main character, or important to some overarching plot point.
People die because-people die! That's what people do!*
And to anybody who would have preferred a neat happy endings, or that everybody survived, or that there were less deaths, or neater deaths, or more dignified deaths, or better deaths - this is war. Nobody ever gets what they deserve, and that's always why the war needs to end.
If you don't understand that, then you might not have understood the point of the series.
*"Sherlock"? Anybody?