Warning: Some Minor Spoilers!
‘The Hunger Games’ series has reawakened from the dystopian ashes, with returning author Suzanne Collins turning the spotlight on the original trilogy’s antagonist, President Snow.
Snow is given the prequel treatment, but thankfully not the redemption-arc treatment. Set 60-something years before Katniss’s story, The Ballad Of Songbirds and Snakes follows an 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow. He’s not yet the sadistic leader of the Capitol we know and hate — here he is an entitled and charming young man with a lot of pent up anger and nowhere to put it. His family has hit hard times financially, and though he’s confident in the importance of his destiny, he’ll have to work hard to get past the horrors of cabbage soup for breakfast.
This book is vastly different to ‘The Hunger Games’ trilogy that came before. Gone is the slick first-person perspective, gone is the breathless pace, gone is the character worth rooting for. Snow’s third-person perspective is dry and dull, creating a feeling of detachment. Given the kind of character he is, perhaps this is intentional. But it doesn’t help the book’s readability. The plot is spread thin through the tedious 500-page length, with the occasional action sequences being too bizarre to be engaging.
And yet it is in the tedious details of Ballad that I find it’s redeeming qualities. Did you ever wonder how the Hunger Games were formed? What twisted mind decided forcing children to kill each other would grant peace? How did they develop the interview process, the sponsorships, the mentoring? I’m going to guess your answer is no. But when I was 14, reading the series for the first time, these questions were always buzzing around my head. Ballad fleshes out the world of Panem, answering these questions and then some.
Set during the 10th annual Hunger Games, Snow is one of 24 senior high school students chosen to be mentors to this year’s tributes (a terrible idea!?). This early version of the Games has little fanfare. The chosen tributes are kept in a cage, with nothing to eat, until the Games begin — which take place in the same old football stadium every year. They are given a handful of weapons and everything is done and dusted relatively quickly. Nobody likes it, barely anybody watches it — not the Capitol citizens, and certainly not the District citizens, most of whom don’t have access to the live footage. Even Snow himself has a distaste for the Games. All of the insight into the creation and marketing of the Games is rather fascinating.
In the latter half of Ballad, we revisit District 12, Katniss’s home, and see familiar places such as the Hob and the Seam. This is where the detail becomes less world-building and more fan-service, as it serves no purpose story-wise and tells us nothing new about the setting. Remember the lake Katniss used to swim in? Remember? Well, it’s here! Wow! It’s … a lake! And guess what!! There is katniss growing in it!!! Foreshadowing????? Goodness me.
Worst of all is the unnecessary backstory given to the song Katniss sings in Mockingjay, ‘The Hanging Tree’. The moment where she sings the haunting song used to be my favourite of the entire series. The lyrics didn’t need explanation, in fact, they were better without it. Now we know the who the ‘dead man’ in the song is: a complete rando who the songwriter saw get hanged. But that songwriter… hooooooooo boy.
When Snow is given the task of mentoring a tribute, he gets assigned to the District 12 girl, because of course he does. His tribute, Lucy Gray Baird, is an extroverted Katniss times 10, and she is utterly annoying. When her name is called at the reaping, she whips a snake out of her clown-costume-dress pocket (???), gets it to bite another girl (?????), and then struts onto the stage and grabs the microphone, belting out a weird song dragged out over three pages. Featuring lyrics such as: “You can’t take my sass. You can’t take my talking. You can kiss my ass, and then keep on walking.” (????????????) You’re right ma’am. I can’t take it. Please stop. It genuinely confounds me that this is the same ‘Hunger Games’ series.
There’s a level of goofiness brought in by Lucy Gray Baird. An over-the-top exaggeration of events that does nothing to benefit the themes or character arcs or plot. She is constantly singing. There are a ridiculous amount of songs in this book — which I usually enjoy reading but never did it feel natural within the context. Beyond her performative personality Lucy Gray remains largely *mysterious*, to both Snow and the reader. Despite that, he immediately falls in love with her (or rather, becomes infatuated) and somehow she reciprocates those feelings.
The romance is one of the driving forces of the plot, so it’s a shame it comes across so artificial. The Hunger Games event itself falls flat, as it turns out reading the perspective of someone watching the Games is quite boring. There is little action involved as Lucy Gray spends the majority of the Games hidden in tunnels and out of reach from cameras. Instead we get pages and pages of Snow whining about his fellow mentors.
I’d say the majority of this book is Snow’s whining. While he has truly faced hardship in the aftermath of the war which spawned the Hunger Games, Snow does not invite pity. He is manipulative and charming and full of “good” ideas — ideas that take him places. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is not about his rise to power, as you may expect from a villain origin story, but more like Baby’s First Murder. His character arc is a slow solidification into the heartlessness we know him for. Though, it is less of an arc and more of a series of choices, each of which have crueler consequences.
What is cruelty? Is it cruelty to force children into an arena to fight to death? You’ll have to read the book to get the answer to this deep, multi-layered, theological question! Seriously though, The Ballad Of Songbirds and Snakes does not present anything to it’s reader that the original Hunger Games trilogy didn’t already do (and better). It’s themes are repetitive, it’s plot is stretched, it’s characters are excruciating. If the story interests you at all, I recommend just waiting for the movie adaptation (yes, it has already been announced) and not slogging through 500 forgettable pages.
My final rating for The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is cabbage soup, BURNT cabbage soup, out of ten.
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