The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Wow.

When I first opened this book, I couldn’t figure out how this pathetic, woe-is-me, weak, yet slightly likeable character ever turned in to the horrid, evil, awful President Snow in the original Hunger Games trilogy.

This book follows the story of young Criolanus Snow mentoring the District 12 girl in the 10th Hunger Games as part of a school assignment.

The reader watches as he becomes completely enamored with Lucy Gray and one begins to soften towards young Coryo, lending to more confusion about the future version of Coriolonus Snow we all know.

As we watch, there’s always an undertone of selfishness in each of his acts, at first, easily explained away by his need to act and maintain appearances in society. We learn he h ad a hard childhood and he reveals a more compassionate side as we see his true feelings of the Games evolve.

Collins does an excellent job with Snow’s character development. The focus of this book is less on the Hunger Games themselves, but rather on the emotional toll it has on the different characters.

While the plot is somewhat predictable (as is the case when writing a prequel to develop a character in a previously written series), the characters are very interesting and this book was still a page-turner.

The level of emotion I experienced whilst reading this novel was not what I was expecting to feel as this book went on. Collins’ writing is perfect for the character development. I liked that there wasn’t a large amount of focus on the Games themselves, since we’ve had 3 books of that already. This book provided a little bit more background a stage setting for Hunger Games the novel, which will likely prompt a re-reading of the series soon.

Overall, this book receives 4/5 stars. It will likely be a while before I choose to read it again, but I will highly recommend this to anyone who was a fan of the Hunger Games trilogy.

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