The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - Suzanne Collins

⭐ 8.0/10

(Originally written by Magdalene)

This is, of course, the prequel to The Hunger Games, and the story of Coriolanus Snow, which I'm not sure anyone asked for. I feel like she could have chosen so many other more interesting characters to give us their backstory. Mags? Effie? But instead we got the big baddie. Sigh.

I had a LOT of thoughts about this book as I was reading it. Snow is 18, from a wealthy family that is newly dirt poor, and during the 10th Hunger Games, he gets chosen to be a mentor to one of the tributes. He's hopeful that if he does well, he'll get a scholarship, so he does whatever it takes to get his tribute, Lucy Gray, to win.

This is 65 years before Katniss's time, so the technology is less developed, and the Capitol is still recovering from the war. There's a lot less glitz and glam, and the Games themselves are way more basic. In fact, Snow is the one coming up with ideas to make them more interesting. One complaint that I had is that the Games were... kind of boring, especially because we were with Snow, watching them, and most of the time he had no idea what was going on. That made it lose a lot of the urgency the other books had.

Having a bad guy as your main character is a bold choice for a mainstream author, and I'm not sure Collins was totally up to the task. Snow isn't a tragic figure with a sob story background. He's kind of poor, and he uses people as he needs to in order to redeem himself and his position. He cares about people occasionally, and his humanity is there, but you can see the potential of his future evil. I thought his tribute was more interesting.

This book is there to help you understand how the world became the way that it is, and their justification for the Games. The people in the Capitol have really strong disdain and prejudice against the district people, treating them as sub-human (familiar?). They see themselves as the good guys in the war. Very strong analogy there.

But despite any complaints, it was really, really interesting, and there could be a lot of really great discussion around this book and its portrayal of morality, classism, empire, etc. I definitely prefer the original trilogy, but that was to be expected.