#covey

“But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,

Obviously the book interpretation is entirely up to the reader, but I like to think that Lucy Gray's grave is empty. Not because she isn't dead. Not because she lives either. But because the whole point of her character after Snow finally cracks is to haunt the narrative, and the most interesting, compelling way she can do that is both for him and for us to never truly know what happens to her afterwards. She's Schrödinger's cat. She's a ghost that lives every time someone replaces the Capitol silence with music. We don't even know if the Covey ever found her. The only thing I choose to believe, whether they did or not, is that that grave is empty.

Okay, so, I've seen a lot of people complaining about how Suzanne Collins wrote The Covey, specifically that they seem to be based on outdated stereotypes of the Romani people, and I would just like to contribute my own thoughts to the conversation, specifically that they are not based on Romani, but rather Bluegrass artists. Let me explain; Bluegrass, as a genre, has an incredibly rich history, being working songs, mining songs, protest songs, ways to spread news, old European ballads carried over and changed to fit The New World, and a million other things, but one of the most important parts of Bluegrass is its connection to Appalachia, especially Kentucky. This would make more sense as something off of which to base your Appalachian characters in your Appalachian setting than a primarily Eurasian ethnic group. There is also a long history of Bluegrass singers traveling, especially in old, beat up trucks, just like the one Lucy Gray says they travelled in. There is so much history of them traveling, in fact, that there is an entire room dedicated to the trucks in which they travelled in the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum. I think this makes a lot more sense, especially because Bluegrass has it's earliest origins in the ballads after which Covey members are named. For a while I was confused about why nobody mentioned this, but then I remembered that most people didn't watch a three hour long documentary on Bluegrass seven times in four days, so this is pretty niche knowledge.