Review: "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" by Suzanne Collins

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
Published May 2020 via Scholastic Press
★★★

With a new Hunger Games prequel on my radar, it was time for two things: to reread the original trilogy, and to give the first prequel a go.

This was previously only vaguely on my radar. I'm not sure why, but although I sped through the original trilogy when it came out, I pretty much ignored Ballad—perhaps because I'm not usually all that interested in prequels, or perhaps because I'm not all that interested in reading the blatant villain's side of the story. (Snow does not, you know, come off all too well in the originals.)

So Collins had a difficult task here: to take a villain and give him an origin story that keeps him a villain but also makes him relatable enough, or sympathetic enough, to keep readers hanging on throughout the book. By and large I think Collins succeeds, but what interests me most is not Snow (I can never quite forget that he starts out rather grasping and turns into a tyrant) but the look back into the early days of the Hunger Games. Because these are Hunger Games unlike the ones Katniss survived: no costume designers or feasts, no preparation—just children locked in animal cages at the zoo and then thrown in the ruins of a stadium to (most likely) die a violent death. Snow and his classmates are the first "mentors" (a role that is primarily about their own clout and has almost nothing to do with actual mentoring), and they are instrumental in shaping what the Games will become.

I probably won't be returning to this, but it made for a fascinating addition to the lore. Will have to see what Haymitch's story brings.