Book #13 for 2024: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I'd read there was a prequel book to the hunger games, and was keen to read it. My assumption was that it would be all about how the games were created, and I was wrong. I should have re-read the original trilogy first, as I took way too long to realise that the central character and anti-hero of the novel was President Snow from the originals; so, this is his backstory. He is having to mentor Lucy because House Snow has suddenly fallen from power, and so he is trying to restore his family's reputation.
Coriolanus Snow is forced to mentor a tribute, Lucy Gray throughout the tenth hunger games; in other words, he's the book's equivalent of Haymitch and Lucy is Katniss. For a while I was wondering if this was a necessary addition to the series, as at first I felt like I was reading a retread of the originals, only with different characters. I would have to re-read the other books to see if they mention the tenth hunger games, as the book does make things more interesting, with a number of tragic events that take place before the games even start, resulting in the deaths of several tributes. I noticed that this book felt more violent than its predecessors, with some particularly brutal killings carried out by Snow and Lucy.
The hunger games section feels a bit rushed, and takes up only part two of the book, while part 3 is mostly about the Capitol and its politics. I wanted to find this section, full of treachery and backstabbing more interesting, but it felt like a huge slog, with long chapters, a lot of which seemed to involve training jabberjays and mockingjays. Also, there were a lot of songs, too many songs in fact, some of which seemed to be to explain the plot. In the end, the final segment did not hold my interest much, and I wish it had been written better, as it felt like there were some quite good concepts. Some of the dialogue felt sloppy; at one point, Snow was said to be "comforted by comfort". I was a little surprised that the novel did not chart his full rise to power, just ending abruptly with another of Snow's cutthroat acts, with the conclusion that "Snow always ends on top".
Overall, I think we don't need any more hunger games-based novels.
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