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The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (A Hunger Games Novel) (The Hunger Games)
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Original price was: $16.99.$10.48Current price is: $10.48.
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Ambition will fuel him.
Competition will drive him.
But power has its price.
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.
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Categories: Best Books of 2024 So Far
Product name:
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (A Hunger Games Novel) (The Hunger Games)
Price:
Original price was: $16.99.$10.48Current price is: $10.48.
Anne Pruitt –
4.5 stars
Amazon delivered my copy early, so I’m going to do a spoiler free review and then a spoilery one. Pardon if this winds up sounding like an English paper. I have thought so much on the morals and questions in this book that I feel like I should have read this in school.
Note: I’m writing this review with the express belief that you, reader, have at least read the book description. Otherwise why are you reading this review?
I want to start this off by saying two things. One, this is not a hero story. Snow is never once, in my opinion, shown to be a hero in this in what we modern folks would call a hero. He’s no Luke Skywalker or redeemed villain. This isn’t some sob backstory to explain “why the bad guy is bad.” This is yet another set of layers to the onion that is Snow.
Second, this book is dark. It’s been a minute since I read the original trilogy, but I swear it wasn’t quite as graphic as this book was. Cannibalism is mentioned, and it’s shown/talked about that someone sawed the leg off a dead woman and ran off with it. One character is killed then hung on a hook and paraded. Another is also gruesomely displayed after their death. Several characters are dragged through processions to “prove a point,” another character is hung from two large poles and left to basically die in the sun. Multiple accounts of vomiting/poison throughout, and a general unpleasantness at the lack of regard for human life.
Non-spoilery review:
This book makes you think. A lot. It makes you question things, and wonder if maybe Snow is right (he’s not), but it’s written in such a way that he’s not a villain. Donald Sutherland in an interview made a great point in saying that Snow isn’t a villain, he’s just a ruthless man doing what he thinks is right to keep his home and country in one piece.
“He does it so well. And he doesn’t think he’s a bad person. He thinks it’s the only way society can survive. And whether you think he’s right or wrong, he doesn’t think he’s bad. He likes himself.”
This should be the mantra for this book. Snow is a conflicting, flawed human. In our society, he’s evil, a sociopath or a psychopath. He’s a murderer and a killer. He’s a bad guy. In his world, he’s one of the masses. He simply lives as he’s been raised to, with a mentality that has been ingrained in him since the war between the Districts and the Capitol. He’s simply more ruthless then most and has the guts to make what he considers the “hard decisions.”
Regardless of the other characters in this, they’re all props to his story–which fits well with the Snow we know from The Hunger Games. Everyone is second stage to Snow and his life. This is his evolution from being a child to a man, to becoming the Snow we know and love/hate.
I definitely don’t think this book is for everyone. I’m sitting here with my mom breathing down my neck because she can’t wait to read it, and I don’t think she’ll like it at all, and she’s a diehard THG trilogy fan. Why? Because not everyone likes to read depressing books. There’s no redemption in this. There’s no saving someone from themselves. This is the fall, stumble, plummet into being a not great person and embracing it fully.
So take that as you will. Full spoilers below about everything.
P.s. This is a standalone.
SPOILERS BELOW
Okay, so, I was worried about this book when I read the first chapter sample and it got announced that Snow would be training the District 12 girl. I thought, oh crap, it’s gonna be a cliche YA. It’s gonna have a stupid romance that undercuts the whole plot and makes him a sap.
And yeah, it did that, and up until the last 50 pages I was teetering on a 3-3.5 stars. And then oh boy, the end.
Lucy Grey was a sweet girl, but she felt off since the beginning. I still can’t fully put my finger on it, but her and Snow’s relationship felt so wrong the entirety of the book. The red flags went up repeatedly every time he made comments about how she was his, and even so far as to say she was his property, and that’s all kinds of wrong. And even though their romance was cute and fluffy, it felt bad, tainted. You knew something was going to happen. It always does in these villain backstories. Usually the whole reason the villain is bad is because the love interest gets brutally killed and then they’re like whelp, guess I’ll just be evil.
Not in this book.
Snow constantly struggles with morality and right and wrong throughout this. Should he turn in his friend to the Capitol because they’re colluding with rebels and could tear down the (flawed) infrastructure? Or should he turn a blind eye and let his friend do his own thing? Is the Hunger Games wrong or good? Is it wrong to view the District people as second class humans? And so on.
This book broaches the topic of racism in very broad terms with the whole District/Capitol thing.
You’ve always known there was a divide between them, but in this, you really see how much the Capitol looks down on the Districts, and you can easily see how that morphs into such a hatred and distaste by the time Katniss first enters the Hunger Games.
But I digress. Snow struggles with morality, but he’s flawed and very, very imperfect. He rationalizes every death he takes as self-defense or some other reason when really he’s just murdered someone because it’s inconvenient for him. He kills (or at least removes her from the picture; it’s ambiguous) Lucy Grey in the end because she’s a loose end and too free. He does it. Not someone else, not some freak accident. He chooses to do it and, by the time it happens, you already know what direction he’s headed in so it’s not quite another nail in the coffin. It fully feels like him tying up loose ends so he can go do whatever he wants.
All the nods to THG characters and names was cool. You also had a lot of The Great Gatsby vibes in the Old Money versus New Money mentality that a lot of the Capitol had with District people who gained a fortune and bought their way into the Capitol life. They’re looked down upon by the old families and viewed as trash.
You saw a lot of the evolution in the Hunger Games, and you can see how it begins to change and grow into what Katniss and Peeta suffered through. You see how it begins to change from a simple punishment to a sport and a holiday, with the growing encouragement that it should be a normal and good thing.
You also see a side of the Capitol you most definitely did not see in the trilogy–suffering. A lot of the book shows Snow struggling with having been a small child living through the Dark Days and the war. He was 8 when the Capitol won, and even then it was hard. You learn about the hell the Capitol lived through as they were besieged by the Districts’ army and forced to ration, starvation, and cannibalism. It’s a hard picture, and it’s so blatantly told. Collins didn’t hold back any punches in this. I never felt like what was done was for shock and awe for the reader, but it was definitely that for the story, and it made sense. Regardless of the Capitol not being at war with the Districts anymore, the tensions were still so high that it makes sense for the Capitol to overreact in their retaliation of events. So when one mentor gets killed by her tribute, they shoot the tribute and parade her body around on a hook at the mentor’s funeral. It’s disgusting, debasing, and shows how much the Capitol views the Districts as nothing more than rodents or livestock.
Anyway, I’ll stop talking. Go read it yourself. It’s a hard read, a heavy read, but it was very, very enjoyable.
R.L. –
This review has spoilers:
This book is most definitely a page turner. Suzanne Collins was brilliant in the way she wrote it. When we first meet Coriolanus Snow, he’s an ordinary, intelligent, relatively kind young man who’s biggest problem is money. He is a far cry from the cruel, inhumane, unscrupulous President Snow that we first met in The Hunger Games books. In fact the entire Capitol is very different than the one we see in The Hunger Games. For the first nine years of the Hunger Games, they are still actual people who do NOT want to watch children killing each other in the arena.
This book was very skillfully written to show how quickly a young man can turn from a guy who just wants to do his best in the new Mentor program for the Hunger Games, so he can win a prize of some sort to go to University and help his two remaining family members, the GrandMa’am and his cousin, Tigris. (The woman who sacrificed a lot to protect her family in this book, only to end up hiding Katniss and her friends in her cellar, so that Katniss can kill President Snow, for turning on her, for kicking her out as a stylist in the games because she wasn’t pretty enough anymore. Granted she had done a LOT of plastic surgery, just like everyone else in the Capitol and she’d embraced her name in doing so.)
One of the saddest parts is when she’s found Coriolanus’s shirt after he killed a tribute, in the arena, in self defense. She can see by looking at the shirt where he was wounded and how he was wounded and that he’d had to kill one of those Tributes himself to get them out. It saddens her, as she puts it, that they’ve turned her cousin who would never have hurt a fly into someone who killed another human being. And it was all to teach him a lesson because what he “liked about the war,” was too much of a fluff piece, as if an eight year child is supposed to love a war that took his parents, his money, and had shown him some parts of humanity, even in the Capitol that were not humane. By the end of the book, he’s changed from an innocent, kind young man who knows how to care about people and who doesn’t believe that the District children are just animals, to a man who shoots a young girl without even thinking of it and then betrays Sejanus, who thought he was his only friend, to Sejanus’s death by hanging, as a traitor, until the end when he first uses what becomes his signature way to kill; he poisons the Dean of his old Academy for hating him and’s his Father and for putting him in those positions, even though, it was really the sadistic Dr. Gaul who pulled the strings to teach him lessons along the way, which the young Mr. Snow does know.
One of the most ironic things is that when he writes up his assignment on what to do to make the games more interesting to the Capitol viewers, one of the main things he’s thinking of is making sure his tribute gets food and water. The secondary idea of betting on the games runs along those lines of getting people involved so they’ll want to spend the money to send in food and water. But it becomes the catalyst to make the games exciting to people.
Of course, just as his report was supposed to be theoretical unless Dr. Gaul decided otherwise, we find out that Dean Highbottom hates the Snows because he was assigned a similar assignment when he was at University. The assignment was a “theoretical” way to punish the districts. The Elder Mr. Snow was the Dean’s best friend and writing partner. The Dean had come up with the Hunger Games as a simple and completely theoretical way to handle the districts and get them back in line, but Mr. Snow kept getting him more and more drunk and kept prodding him for more and more ideas until the Hunger Games were fully formed on paper. Dean Highbottom was given the accolades for coming up with the Hunger Games and he couldn’t live with having helped to create something so evil. Again, they were told it was theoretical but The Elder Snow clearly made sure he was able to extract every bit of information he could from his “friend.”
I’d like to see more books that feature both Coriolanus and Lucy Grey Baird. I’ve often wondered if Lucy Grey was Katniss’s Grandmother or at least maybe one of the other Covey people. The fact is that Lucy Grey’s strongest gift is that she can sing. We find out in the book that she knows the “Hanging Tree Song.” She either wrote it or simply knew it very well. Katniss’s Father knew that song and used to sing it and he taught it to Katniss. One of his great strengths is also singing. Both he and Katniss have voices that are so beautiful that the Mockingjays stop to listen when they sing. It’s something they would have inherited. Also Lucy Grey was dumped in the Seam part of District 12. She also knows every inch of the woods beyond District 12. She knows where the pond is that Katniss’s Dad taught her to fish and swim in and she knows where the old stone remnants of a broken down house are, where Katniss used to play. Katniss’s Father also loved to have things clean. He hated the coal dust that settled on everything. Lucy Grey loved life and color and she liked things clean too; all things she could have taught a son. There are so many places in the woods where Katniss used to go with her Father, that Lucy Grey knew about too. We know it’s rare for someone to stumble onto them because even Gale didn’t know all of those places. It does make me wonder if she was Katniss’s Paternal Grandmother. I’d like to know. I’d like to know more of what happens to Lucy Grey and even to Coriolanus. I hope that Suzanne Collins writes more books in this prequel.
Having said all of this, though, the main point is how skillfully Suzanne Collins shows the slippery slope for all of us from civilized human beings to bloodthirsty people who kill and take pleasure in killing, and who believe that because you’re born in a certain place, it makes you less than human. She starts out with good people in the Snow home and shows the distinct decline that Coriolanus takes rather quickly to being a very deadly killer. He also begins as someone who knew how to love and what it was like to be loved, only to be corrupted to become a man who believes that power is everything, that there is nothing, not even family, that is more important than power. We see that when he decides at the end of the book that he will not fall in love again. He will marry for position. And we see it in the Hunger Games when Coriolanus is President of Panem and his cousin Tigris, who did everything she could to provide for him and protect him is living in a tiny shop, barely earning any money. And one of the cruelest twists was when her cousin cut her from being a stylist in the hunger games because she’d always wanted to be a stylist of some sort. In fact the reason Coriolanus looked as good as he did when they were so poor was her talent for fixing up old things. By the end of the Hunger Games Series, she helps Katniss to try and get to her cousin to kill him. First she hides them, then she gives them clothes to help them blend in with the Capitol people. So by the end of the book Coriolanus has not only learned to kill those who get in his way but he’s also decided that he will never put anything above power. Which also makes me wonder if he ever does anything to punish Dr. Gaul, or if she’s too useful for the time being.
Nicole Lane –
Honestamente me preocupaba que llegara maltratado, pero no, llego en perfectas condiciones, está hermoso. Si eres fan de los juegos del hambre tienes que leerlo, la historia es 100% recomendable.
Christine E. Ippolito –
A edição combina muito com o box que eu tinha de jogos vorazes, combinou super. Mesmo capa dura não é super pesado, o papel é de muita boa qualidade, nada negativo a falar.
A história então? Excelente, fui ler depois de ver o filme e nossa é muito incrível, todo mundo tem que lembrar que é um vilão esse Coriolanus porque muito difícil defender o que ele faz, especialmente ao final. Também muito bom ler tendo em mente as citações no começo do livro.
Super recomendo. Terminei de ler em começo de Junho e agora final de Julho já to querendo ler de novo.
(P.s.: é um livro melhor apreciado lendo-o na ordem de lançamento, não na ordem cronológica da história)
HenrietteIM –
I enjoyed this more than the original Hunger Games trilogy. It’s a more mature novel: less about fast-paced action (although there is still plenty of that) and more about character development, showing how the brutal environment of Panem shapes people for better or for worse.
Coriolanus Snow (Coryo) is an intriguing character who has enough likeable qualities that you can root for him, and enough flaws that it’s plausible who he will become. That’s a hard balance to create, and Collins pulls it off. The character of Sejanus was well drawn too, and although Lucy Gray is left more ambiguous, she sparkles in a way that makes the reader naturally want her to succeed.
My one criticism is that the ending felt a little rushed, and Collins seemed to gloss over Coryo’s final descent into evil. I would liked to have known more about his thought processes at that point.
But overall, an excellent prequel which also works well as a novel in its own right.
Anne Pruitt –
This book was excelleny. It.reminded me of the first time I read the Hunger games trilogy. I couldn’t put it down. Suzanne Collins really has.a way of writing and keeping the reader Wanting more. I love how she really flashes out Cordell an us Snow. It really gives some insight re: The Hunger Games and his role. I preferred reading the trilogy and THEN this book. Even though, you can read this one first and still enjoy the trilogy. I think I would read Suzanne Collins’ grocery list…
Luna –
Ik had de film gezien voor ik het boek in handen kreeg en het boek is beter, omdat het meer details heeft.
Ik hoop dat het nieuwe boek net zo goed is als deze.
Deborah Nagy –
It’s just the kind of story that catches fire.
Following the story of the tenth annual Hunger Games, sixty four years before Primrose Everdeen’s name is pulled at the reaping, the history of the Games and of Panem itself is revealed.
Coriolanus Snow is ambitious despite the tough times that have fallen upon his family. When it is revealed that students will become the first ever mentors in the Hunger Games, Coriolanus is humiliated by being placed as the mentor for the District 12 girl. But Coriolanus is ambitious, competitive, and smart. He’s determined to have his tribute win at all costs. What he doesn’t realize is how intertwined their lives will become.
This book has single handedly revived my complete and total obsession of the Hunger Games. I need to re-read all of the series now because I had forgotten just HOW obsessed I was.
I loved the origin story aspect of this. It was so profoundly interesting to see what the Hunger Games had been like before and to learn more about Snow’s backstory!! I loved all of the interconnected aspects. Basically all of my Kindle highlights are references to future people or things (“Hey, you’ve found some Katniss” KILLED ME).
I sincerely hope that Suzanne Collins continues writing because she is just an unbelievable story teller.
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