Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!
PRODUCT
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (A Hunger Games Novel) (The Hunger Games)
Product Description:
Price:
$10.99
Detailed description:
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.
Read more
Product group:
Categories: Best Books of 2024 So Far
Product name:
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (A Hunger Games Novel) (The Hunger Games)
Price:
$10.99
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.
Amazon Customer –
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.
Deborah Nagy –
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 –
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.
Nicole Lane –
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.
1 like
Tia Ruff –
I’m a reader- I love to read and my absolute favorite genre is dystopian literature. This book is captivating on so many levels, especially if you have been a fan of the original Hunger Games trilogy. Follow Snow’s upbringing, gain an empathy for him, and then be reminded in the end why he was hated. Simply brilliant story telling. Multiple- read through type of book– prep now, another ones on the way!
Luna –
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.
Word Nerd –
The book was not great, nor very exciting or realistic. But if you are a Hunger Games fan, you really do have to read it. Suzanne Collins is a good writer, so I did find myself compelled by her words and found it often hard to put the book down. That said, there were a few things that felt forced in the storyline, and the timeline felt a little off. For example, the games were going on for 10 years already, and they were only just getting around to working out the bugs. Also, by the time Katniss came along, the games had been in effect for 75 years. That would make Snow something like 85 years old. He wasn’t described as that old in the Hunger Games series. And in this book, Panem did not have the advanced technology they had 60 years later. However, this seems wrong since Panem is already far into “our” future. So shouldn’t they already have the holograms and high tech gadgets?
Things I liked:
It was interesting to see the Hunger Games from the earlier days when tributes were treated more like animals than celebrities, and the arena was an actual arena, like in a bull fight.
The idea that there were vagabonds throughout Panem, who weren’t part of any district.
The idea that in the old days, not all the tributes made it to the games. (Though I think they’d have worked that out in 10 years.)
I loved Lucy Gray Baird.
I liked the appearance of Tigris.
Snow’s transformation from a reasonable human being to an obsessive deviant.
What I did not like:
While I did like the district 12 tribute (Lucy), she wasn’t very realistic. She was too cheerful for someone who wasn’t even from the districts and got thrown into their bizarre death ritual.
The misconception that Snow was poor and hungry. In the first few pages, they try to depict Snow as someone who hadn’t eaten in days, someone who rarely has anything but cabbage soup. Then suddenly his cousin shows up with potatoes and veggies and they ate pretty well. From then on, Snow ate ALL THE TIME. He was always eating. The tributes were also eating all the time. It seemed like no one ever went hungry, even though the narration implied that everyone was poor and starving.
The never-ending page after page of singing. This is the worst thing to put in a book. You can’t read a song! I don’t know the music and I don’t feel like making up a tune to go with pages worth of someone else’s lyrics. How annoying! This was so obviously Suzanne Collins setting the book up to be a movie. Annoying. Oh and how about some of the songs that just happened to be the ones Katniss sang later. Really? This is a play on OUR future. No one has a David Bowie song stashed somewhere?
Despite my dislikes, I am glad I read it and I think if you are a fan, you should definitely read. Don’t expect great Hunger Games characters or even much of a storyline. Think of it as a bit of supplemental info on a great trilogy.
Booksy girl –
I’m not sure I have words for this book. I devoured and loved Hunger Games and I do love this book. It was a great addition. In the beginning I thought Snow had some redeemable qualities. There was some hope that the Snow we met in the Hunger Games had suffered some great tragedy that led him to be that character. Nope! He was cruel and Capitol. Snow was indeed the character we met. Lucy was the factor that brought out the best in him however, it couldn’t last.
I adored Lucy. I hate that we don’t really know what happened with her. She was so much like Katniss in many ways. Strong and unique and smart.
Collins did a great job of showing us how many of Snow’s qualities came to be and creating Panem. She also showed us that despite how bad Katniss and Peeta had it in the Hunger Games, Lucy and these tributes had it much worse.