Status
Series
Publication
Description
It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined, every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute, and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.… (more)
Similar in this library
User reviews
I had no expectations going into The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. You see, I ignored all prerelease information as well as the synopsis before starting. The only bit of information I knew before opening the cover was the fact that Snow was the main character.
In many ways, because I started the story blind, I enjoyed The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes more than I expected I would. It will shock no one when I say that young Snow is not adult Snow. While I did not feel sympathy for him, I do recognize how traumatic the war between the Capitol and the districts was for him. I also recognize the immense pressure he feels to maintain the family honor and hide his poverty.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching Snow evolve into the person we know him to be. Like all good tyrants, Snow does not start out intending to be a despot. In fact, young Snow is naive and desperate to earn prize money so that he can attend University. This makes him simultaneously eager to please and easy to manipulate, which is exactly what happens.
The thing is, for all of Snow’s own experiences with hardship and deprivation, he remains at heart a snob. Even as he witnesses firsthand the poverty and utter lack of anything that the rest of Panem experiences, he fails to see similarities between his and their situations. If anything, his belief in his own superiority becomes more concrete. Once you add a mentor who considers mankind inherently evil, you begin to see not only where his paths diverge but also to understand how he decides upon the path he does.
Panem itself appears largely as it does in the subsequent novels with the exception of the Capitol and the Hunger Games themselves. Ten years after the war, and the Capitol still shows the ravages of that war. Scarcity remains for those without money, as does any property damage from the war, and we only catch glimpses of the crazy decadence the Capitol later becomes.
As for the Games, they are in their tenth iteration and initially look nothing like the Games Katniss and Peeta enter. There is no fancy arena designed specifically for the Games, no sponsorship, no pomp and circumstance for the tributes. In fact, Snow and twenty-three of his classmates are the first mentors, brought in as a way to make the 10th anniversary of the Games different. As part of their mentor duties, they debate ways to make the Games more exciting and mandatory viewing. In their assignments, we see the first inklings of the macabre entertainment the Games later become.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes has a strong philosophical bent, reinforced by the epigraphs Ms. Collins includes. As a result, there are no easy solutions to the choices Snow faces. One might even feel empathy for him as he struggles to decide how best to treat humanity at large.
Along the same vein, Snow’s relationship with his assigned tribute remains murky. Much like the Wordsworth ballad Lucy Gray recites, Ms. Collins lets the reader decide what Lucy Gray’s true intentions are. How you see her character will depend on your philosophical beliefs of man and man’s goodness, which makes The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes the perfect prequel to the rest of the Hunger Games trilogy.
All this to say that I actually liked The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I appreciate any author who presents her characters but leaves their “goodness” or “evilness” for the reader to determine. As I said earlier, most people do not start out in life wanting to become a tyrant. One obtains the title through a series of decisions and choices. Such is the case with Coriolanus Snow.
The protagonist is Coriolanus Snow -- President of
On the plus side, it was an absorbing read. There were a lot of details about Katniss's world that are fun to spot. I loved getting to see Tigris when she was young and not nearly as scary and strange as when Katniss met her. And I'm continuing to speculate about exactly how Katniss and Lucy Gray are related.
It seems like I might be in the minority, but I really enjoyed this book. I went into this with very few expectations and having not read the original trilogy in about 10 years
I think one of the clearest missions of this book is to examine the ways we develop beliefs about ourselves, our fellow people, and the world around us and how this doesn't happen in a vacuum but rather is the product of circumstance. It also clearly discusses the construction of in-groups and out-groups and the ramifications of that.
The sociology of this book was what was so interesting to me, so excuse me if this reads more like a book report than a review. Collins has never been that subtle in her metaphor and critiques in this series but just because it's obvious what she's trying to say doesn't mean it's not well done. There were so many interesting points in this book that I've been having trouble thinking about this review because there's so much I could write about. I'm having to look through my Kindle highlights just so I can remember what I want to say. Though I think at times, Collins tries to cover too much ground, I think the points she is making in this book through the descriptions of the games in its early years and through the music motif is well done and gives me a lot to sink my teeth in.
I think anyone reading the hunger games can pick up a bit on that fact that it is a media event and Collins did that to critique the way our own media industry works. Because this game comes before it has really been transformed into an extravagant event, it is interesting to see how she lays the groundwork of the idea of it been a media circus. That idea is there very literally. Lucy Gray's dress is compared to a clown costume and the arena where the game is held is discussed as formally being the site of the circus. It also exist in the distance the capitol mentors have towards the games. Like many of us with celebrities and media personalities, we can sometimes fall into the trap of thinking we know them and taking ownership over them. Though the situation of the hunger games is obviously quite different, We see that the mentors engage with this as something to be entertaining while still believing they have some form of ownership over the participants and their successes. This is driven home even more in the way Snow discusses Lucy Gray and their relationship and how jealousy he is and how much he believes he has to do with her victory.
They were back in the arena, fighting for survival, just the two of them against the world.
The idea of human nature is explicitly stated in this book, I mean, Snow is literally writing essays about it so I wouldn't say this point is subtle. The debate presented in this book is about whether humans are essentially violent and need to be controlled by a capitol like entity or whether humans are naturally good and the violence sometimes exhibited by them is the product of the circumstances they are placed in. Though Snow by the end of the book has certainly been convinced by the former statement, I don't think we the reader are supposed to have that take away, or at least we are supposed to think about it more. I think this is because while Snow is the protagonist, Lucy Gray is the hero and she is not convinced that humans are evil inherently.
"People aren't so bad, really," she said. "It's what the world does to them. Like us, in the arena. We did things in there we'd never have considered if they'd just left us alone."
The actions people take in their most desperate moment can so easily be construed as what they essentially are rather than who they are only at their most desperate. This quote and others like I think demonstrate that this is as much the point of the hunger games as anything else. The Capitol must convince everyone that people in the districts must be controlled or they will be violent and how better to show it then showing that their children, who are supposed to be the most innocent, are capable of killing each other.
"Because we credit them with innocence. And if even the most innocent among us turn to killers in the Hunger Games, what does that say? That our essential nature is violent," Snow explained.
What it really says is that people will become what they must be to survive but Lucy Gray is right, if those kids weren't in a killing competition, they wouldn't kill. But when all you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail.
The person who most needed to be convinced of this idea was Snow. I think many people went into this book expecting some sort of "redemption" story or explanation for his evil or the same sort of action as the other books and that's not what this is. What it is is an examination of how evil does not develop in a vacuum. Snow got his ideas from being taught them by Dr. Gaul, by being the shown the very worst of people intentionally. If this book is an attempt to shown the complexity of a villain and their ideas and think it succeeded on all fronts. If Snow was born in District 12, his ideas would have been different because his upbringing would have been different. We are shown this through the character of Sejanus. We are all a product of our circumstances but that doesn't mean we can't grow and change. In this case however, what Snow learned caused him to change into a worse person and we must acknowledge that things like that may happen to people. If we believe, like Lucy Gray, that people are not inherently evil we must also believe that things can happen to people that leads them to grow evil and that is what is demonstrated here.
This book also further examines that in-group vs. out-group concept between the Capitol and the districts that has existed throughout this series. However, these feelings come closer to the end of the war and therefore are stronger. We see in this book an interesting examination of a lack of cultural relativity. The districts are described as barbaric and almost less than human and their practices and traditions are described as backwards.
"They're not like me!" the little girl protested."They're district. That's why they belong in a cage!"
A second-class citizen. Human, but bestial. Smart, perhapse, but not evolved. Part of a shapeless mass of unfortunate, barbaric creatures that hovered on the periphery of his consciousness.
This idea is pretty explicit but I think whats slightly more subtle is they way this line of thinking contributes to the ownership Snow feels over Lucy Grey. You can see how their relationship is imbalanced and how Snow falls into rhetoric seen in abusive relationships.
As if he was hunting her. But he wasn't really going to kill her. Just talk to her and make sure she saw sense.
Even if Lucy Gray was confused on the issue, in the eyes of the Capitol, she belonged to him.
In some ways, it had been better to have her locked up in the Capitol, where he always had a general idea of what she was doing.
By situating the district citizens as less than human and backwards, it becomes easy for Capitol citizens like Snow to convince themselves that they know better and should therefore control all the actions of the districts. It is easy to see how an abusive relationship would follow from that. And even though the Capitol believes that the district beliefs and practices are backwards it is important to remember it is the Capitol that instituted the Hunger Games and, as we see in the book, many Capitol citizens are more concerned with the destruction of a flag than the death of district children (can't imagine what that might be a reference to...).
As you can see, I have a lot to say about this book and I'm probably going to think about this one for a while. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if I went back and changed my rating to five stars, not because I think this is perfect but because of the work Collins put into the metaphors in this book. I didn't even really get into the role of songs, birds and snakes, mostly because I don't feel qualified. I know a lot of people were disappointment in this book but I think if you go into this book looking at it through the lens of metaphor for how evil develops and not an action packed Hunger Games book, I think people could really enjoy this just as much as I did.
------------------------------------
review to come, probably tomorrow. I need to think on this one and review my notes and highlights but know that I really, really enjoyed it and would give it like 4.5 stars, I just didn't think it was a perfect book which is why I'm not giving it 5 stars.
Though this book has a somewhat different feel than the original Hunger Games trilogy, it was nice to return to Suzanne Collins and the world of Panem. It was initially hard to reconcile the Snow of the original trilogy to the teenage Snow of this book. I wanted to hate him but I couldn't. He was actually a fairly decent guy once upon a time. The book is more or less divided into two halves, the first being the events of the 10th Hunger Games and the second being the events that occur afterwards. While I enjoyed revisiting the actual events of the Hunger Games again, they were much less refined and they lacked the creativity of the later Games. However, we did get to see how some of the qualities of the games evolved into what they were in later years.
Suzanne Collins tried to make Snow appear more humane by incorporating the relationship between he and Lucy Gray. I bought into this up to a point. But I didn't care for the second half of the book nearly as much as the first, and I really didn't like the way his character evolved almost overnight. It felt too sudden and choppy and unrealistic, and while I didn't exactly dislike the ending, I didn't like the way Collins fleshed it out to get there. It just felt unfulfilling.
I didn't dislike this book. It's hard to write a prequel that lives up to its original series, and I don't feel that this one necessarily deserved some of the bad reviews that it got. There were parts that were lacking, but I did enjoy it for the most part.
Basically, I don’t know what the point of this book was. Why did we need to see what Snow’s teenage years were like? After finishing the book, I don’t really feel like I gained any insight into his character. He’s an awful man, what more did I need to know?
It was interesting to take a look at the post-war Capitol, because after 10 years the city was still suffering the aftereffects of the uprising and it’s not the high-tech, fashion-forward city we see in the trilogy. In the same vein, the 10th annual Hunger Games are vastly different from the 74th and 75th games Katniss is forced into. The 10th games were incredibly low-tech in comparison, so it was neat in a disturbing way to think about the strides the Capitol made in developing the games, and even the treatment of the tributes.
That being said, I’d much rather have had a sort of lore/textbook that goes over the history of the development of the Capitol and the games. The early history of Panem would be cool too. But realistically, after loving my re-read of the trilogy, I don’t need any more Hunger Games books. I love what Collins accomplished with the trilogy and I think it’s ok to have unanswered questions.
Especially if that question is: what was Coriolanus Snow’s childhood like?
I did find this explanation from Collins:
“ On returning to the world of The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins said, “With this book, I wanted to explore the state of nature, who we are, and what we perceive is required for our survival. The reconstruction period ten years after the war, commonly referred to as the Dark Days—as the country of Panem struggles back to its feet—provides fertile ground for characters to grapple with these questions and thereby define their views of humanity.” “
Reading that, I kind of see where she was trying to explore humanity and what those in the Capitol feel is needed for survival. I’m not sure it needed to center around Snow though. Of course, I can’t sit here and tell you who would be a better character to follow. But overall, I was incredibly unimpressed by this book and despite Collins’s explanation, I still feel like it was unnecessary. However, if she wrote more Hunger Games books, even about Snow, I’d buy them because I’m a slut for the series. My advice to the more casual reader would be to either skip this book or borrow it from the library though.
If you want more detial, a spoiler-full rant is also up on my blog.
This was a prequel story to the events that happened in the Hunger Games Trilogy, set some 60 odd years before we meet Katniss Everdeen in that series. It is the prequel of the villain in those stories, President Snow, so from
There’s also a really large cast of characters, a catchy beginning but relatively slow-moving story, too many paragraphs of song ballads, and a lightning fast ending that did not make sense, and to-da! Now you know why Snow is such a bad dude!
It was worth reading if you are a Hunger Games fan, but the story is not told evenly and though you get a hint of how Snow evolves, it somehow does not all add up. I am glad I borrowed it and did not buy it. (3 stars)
Hunger Games fans will enjoy visiting lots of places from the original trilogy (the cabin in the woods, the meadow, the Hob), although more cynical Hunger Games fans will think it is amazingly unlikely that Katniss's nemesis actually spent his childhood wandering around her home town.
I am not Roma, and so am probably not best placed to comment on whether the covey are a good attempt to introduce more minority charactors and a more diverse world, or another set of stereotypes about travelling people who sing beautifully and tragically die young, It seems worth considering as a question though.
People want characters to have some quality that redeems him/her. If we only met Corio through other characters' eyes, we would feel he has some redeeming traits. By being inside his head, we know what he's really thinking and can determine the degree to which Corio does or does not have redeeming traits. Corio values prestige. Living through the war, being hungry, and hiding their economic decline grates on him. He "plays" for his audience at all times, always thinking what will serve him best. We meet the people he attends school with and discover that he often says what he thinks they want to hear. He hopes to pull his family up to where they belong, so he strives to succeed. This year, there are changes to the hunger games and the students will mentor/sponsor a participant. Corio gets one of the worst districts: District 12. He'll never win. It's time to make a plan.
The lady in charge of the hunger games, Dr. Gaul, has little humanity. She finds Coriolanus an interesting specimen, watching him closely, performing a few experiments to see how he behaves and/or adapts. The students receive an assignment to think of ways to make the hunger games more successful. Coriolanus excels with this thinking. Gambling and allowing people to send gifts to participants would make it more interesting. These are immediately accepted and enacted by Dr. Gaul. Thankfully, Corio ends up with a girl, Lucy Gray, who knows how to work an audience. He's got something to work with. He needs to sway the audience to get money and gifts for her.
I'll stop there. I don't believe in spoilers unless writing an analytical essay! The actual hunger games take up a small portion of the novel. After the games, we see the consequences of Corio's choices, hoping he is forced to change because of circumstances. In the end, the novel completely develops Coriolanus Snow's character and how he becomes the man he presents in the Hunger Games trilogy. If people think there are loose ends, there are none for his character, which is the point of the novel--his character. You understand why the hunger games exist as they do in the trilogy and why he makes the decisions his makes in regards to the districts and Catniss. Enjoy the journey into his unbending mind.
Snow has always been a “person of the community”. His parents were elites before the war, and perished during the conflicts. Snow was left with his cousin Tigress and his Grandma’am. They live in “privileged poverty”. They still live in fancy apartments even though most of the furniture is gone, and so is anything of real value. Snow is living hand to mouth.
We start the story in what would be the equivalent of Snow's senior year of highschool. The 10th annual Hunger Games are about to take place and the capitol is trying to get more people interested and watching the blood and gore. They decide to pair each tribute with a member of the academy, and Snow is matched with the girl from 12, named Lucy Gray.
Snow needs a prize from school in order to attend University. This means he has to make a good showing with his tribute. But Lucy gets under his skin. She sings like an angel, and does not seem as menacing, or like someone out to destroy the capitol.
This story takes us many places. We get an idea of where the “dogs” from the first book originate, how the games became a real game instead of just a torture session, etc. We get to see a side of Snow that he wants to be, as well as the side that is actually who he is. This may seem contradictory, but read the book and you will understand.
Not all questions from the original trilogy are neatly tied up. There are still lots of questions like why is Snow purple, how does he become president, and even new questions about the new characters like “what happens to Dr. Gahl” and where did Lucy go?
Overall, I enjoyed my trip back to Panem, but I didn’t love it. I survived and have come back home. I’m glad I read it, but nothing would have changed in life if I had not read book 4.
I almost didn’t read this. I’d noticed mostly negative reviews and seen mostly low ratings. I’m so glad I read the book because I loved it. 4-1/2 stars.
One thing though:
This book is dedicated to Norton Juster (author of The Phantom Tollbooth) and his wife and I love that!
But it was surprisingly interesting. The naive young man at the start of the novel does begin to morph into the tyrant from the trilogy, but the supporting characters and the route he travels is
Woven throughout this novel is the question of human nature. Are people basically good, or are they basically self-serving, bent on survival at any price? Snow's philiosophy is balanced against that of his classmate, Sejanus Plinth, who emigrated from District 2. Sejanus is an idealist, and Coriolanus is a realist.
So while there is plenty of action, there is more philosophy in this prequel, and for that it gets five stars from me.