The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

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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I’d say I’m not a huge prequel person in general, but this one works for me. Here’s why: while you would likely enjoy it immensely reading as someone virginal to The Hunger Games ecosystem, if you have read it before, the unspoken words do just as much work as the spoken ones. There’s this striking relationship between the said and the unsaid that’s just…delicious. It reminds me a lot of Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s studies about leaving space for characters to breathe and let the reader fill in the gaps (since reading is an active construction that relies a lot on your own memories to create full worlds.)

Similar to the main series, it boils a lot of sophisticated thought and nuance into a commercially appealing plot. It’s well-paced, so you rarely get bored (but I’ll talk more about that later), and so sharply written that you don’t feel like you have to work to understand any of the events, developments, or terminology.

I have a lot of positive thoughts about The Ballad of Songbird and Snakes. I thought it was pretty brilliant.

THE CHARACTERS

Coriolanus has a lot of harsh qualities. He’s charming (manipulative), intelligent (calculating), and ambitious (jealous.) BUT — and this is a big one — he’s sympathetic. We don’t love him, or even like him, but I understood him and appreciated rare shows of warmth or sensitivity as they came.

What’s so compelling about the narrative is that we’re given a first-row seat to his balancing act, seeing all the tipping points that made him who he is. Each moral dilemma changes him subtly over time but it’s very “rock and a hard place”. In some choices, Suzanne Collins convinces us that he had no other choice. It’s not often black and white, which I appreciated.

His goal was survival, and the meaning of that term changed over time.

I generally prefer kind characters, and to read about good people, so it takes a lot for me to like a person who makes cruel decisions. In that sense, I have to give Suzanne Collins props for that. Respectably, Snow maintained the core attributes that we see in the original series (which I read immediately after tackling Ballad) — control, obsession, charm to the point of manipulation, survival, calculation, allowing Collins to demonstrate that it wasn’t the possession of them but rather the perversion of them over time that led to his fundamental dystopia.

I’ll be honest in that the other characters weren’t particularly memorable to me; this was an individualized portrait of one person succumbing to his darkness. There were characters both better and worse than him. I liked the guy from District 2 who embodied the best of the morality around him — Sejanus — who fundamentally opposed what the Hunger Games stood for. We saw him start to almost convince Coriolanus, at least enough for some guilt to creep in. Their relationship was complicated, and the narrative benefited from it.

The girl, Lucy Gray? She was definitely interesting, almost Manic Pixie-like, but Coriolanus is under the impression that he’s in love with her and he most assuredly is not. I’m not sure if this is just Suzanne Collins maybe not being great at writing romance, or teens believing they’re in love, or romance not existing in this dystopia, or even an intentional choice to show Coriolanus’s inability to be attached to anyone, but let it be known! (I’m also all for ace rep, which many have pointed out retroactively exists in the Hunger Games universe as well.) I just wanted to clarify that despite it being somewhat billed as a doomed lovers story. I loved the complication of it though. The yearning of it could be painful, as their “relationship” was usually a surrogate for the joy and stability they craved in a world that would ultimately refuse to see them happy. Angst!

WORLDBUILDING

The world-building in this is both a shocker and a marvel. Instead of the lush, calculated ritual of The Hunger Games in the original series, the entire process is harsh and stripped down in the prequel. As I mentioned, this was an excellent way that Suzanne Collins played with spacing between the two series; my mind automatically filled in the gaps of what conclusions Snow must have come to between the two stories in order to further torment the tributes and enhance the spectacle. Absolutely stunning choice there.

I was admittedly disappointed not to have the creativity of the interviews and the parade and all, because Collins did such a sweepingly detailed job of making them engaging in the original series. It’s a sparse and stripped down version. The tributes are stored in the zoo, and unfed until their time in the arena. There’s no training — no Careers. It has no bells, whistles, or showmanship. (My dad watched the movie with us in the fall and said it was kind of a sick concept, which is admittedly funny coming from a self-professed mafia/serial killer movie guy.) I did miss some of the flavor, and was promptly ashamed of myself for it.

The arena was essentially the Colosseum, which draws a clear parallel to Suzanne Collins’s inspiration of Roman gladiators. The arena scenes — from the perspective of Snow as a mentor — were compelling, and I loved seeing the politics of how the mentors dealt with getting supplies to their tributes. It had more of a PR spin.

Admittedly, I was expecting significantly more of the book to take place within the arena, and was disappointed when it ended. But more on that.

THE PLOT & PACING

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a bit less overtly engaging than the original series (partly because it’s hard to beat the stakes of Katniss’s life-or-death necessity) but it is compelling in an entirely new way. It’s much more philosophical, drawing on Machiavellian tendencies and bodies of thought that consistently change the way Coriolanus thinks. As I love any book with an existential slant, I loved it, although some readers may find it a bit slower.

That being said, slow for Suzanne Collins still means cracklingly smart and twisted. Her plot twists were still phenomenal, and I found myself on the edge of my seat during some truly pulse-pounding sequences. The action and tension are exquisite. The ending? Damn.

As noted, I’d expected more of the book to occur in the arena, so I found some of the tension deflated afterwards because I wasn’t exactly sure what the stakes were anymore. We knew what the outcome of the Games were, and we knew he’d be President. What else was there? With the most searing question answered, some of the book lost its spark — but it quickly picked up new worries and concerns that inflamed existing threads.

Ultimately, there were sections that lagged a bit more than I’m used to with Collins, but it was overall unputdownable, and I welcomed the more reflective and introspective pages that grappled with the nature of the Games. And there’s one sequence at the end in which everything utterly clicks…

WRITING

I think Suzanne Collins must have made a deal with the Devil to be this good. It isn’t prose you notice; it’s prose that utterly melts away so that you’re fully transported. She’s so strong in plotting, pacing, worldbuilding, and characterization that writing is usually the last thing I notice — but it’s still powerful. She’s the whole package.

In Ballad, I notice a lot more of her thought process and philosophy in constructing the dystopia, which ultimately is what dystopian settings are about. What are the ugly pieces of human nature that reveal themselves when people are backed into a corner? How do people think we’ll solve societal problems, and what new problems do those solutions reveal? It’s all extremely big-picture, which is sharply refreshing.

I actually found out later that David Levithan edited this, so it makes a lot of sense. I don’t usually have favorite editors, but David is mine. He’s done a world of good for YA publishing, and has a hand in my favorite books. I’m used to those searing human questions in his work, and he often does a great job of distilling complex existential emotions into a singular line or two. So perhaps that distillation of philosophy benefited from both author and editor.

There are also a ton of Easter eggs and references that ultimately make their way into the original series! The amount of tie-ins are extremely pleasurable and circular, and make everything feel very wrapped up. All in all, it adds that perfect final flourish to the series that makes it one of those stories that’s an organism, that feels like a fully-fledged entity by itself that we just happen to be privy to. It’s one of the greats.

Also? I’m convinced Suzanne Collins must have built the entire book around that last line. It’s mindblowing.

OVERALL

In case my gushing over every detail didn’t give it away, I loved it. I’d highly recommend to those who loved the Hunger Games. It’s slower and more philosophical than its original series — more so slow-building tension than explosive action sequences — although each climax of each thread is worth the wait.

I was especially intrigued by the flashes of insight into the creation of Panem as it exists in the trilogy, and my mind loved playing with the gaps between the books and the prequel. I also give mad props to Suzanne Collins for making me invested in Snow’s story despite knowing how he turns out. (On that note, if you’re going to dislike it because he’s a morally corrupt character, don’t read?) I think it’s one of the more successful prequels I’ve read, and I loved all the details that contributed to my understanding of the series as a whole.