I read the original Hunger Games trilogy around the time the movies were coming out, because sometimes I like to keep an eye on what’s popular. I remember enjoying the first book, then enjoying the second book less, and then not enjoying the third book at all. The third book was tedious, repetitive and dull, in my opinion.
Unfortunately, that downward trend has only continued into Suzanne Collins’s prequel novel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Set decades before the events of the original trilogy, the book is an origin story of sorts for the trilogy’s President Snow. Here, Coriolanus Snow (“Coryo” to his friends) is the young scion of a once-prominent family within the Capital, the major city of Panem. After losing his parents to the war against the Rebels, Snow’s family has fallen on hard times, though Coryo tries to hide that fact from his friends at school. He is desperate to win a scholarship prize so he can go to university and reclaim a place among the capital’s elite.
Snow gets his chance through the 10th annual edition of the Hunger Games, featuring, as in the original books, two tributes from each of Panem’s twelve districts fighting to the death for the Capital’s amusement. Snow has been chosen as one of the mentors, the capital residents who will supervise the tributes as they prepare for the games. Snow initially expects his family name to secure him one of the top candidates to win in the arena, but instead he gets a young girl from District 12, the lowliest of the districts. Her name is Lucy Gray Baird.
Lucy is an orphan and a singer, with no obvious deadly talents or physical strengths to make her formidable in the arena. Snow is convinced he’s stuck with a loser, but Lucy’s charm and beauty winnow away at him, until he becomes determined to help her survive the Games.
It’s a perilous time for the Games themselves, too. Rebels seem determined to prevent them from taking place, and interest in them is waning in the Capital. The school’s dean and the head gameskeeper have tasked the students at Snow’s academy with considering this problem and offering solutions. Though not much of a fan of the Games, Snow proves adept at coming up with innovations to increase audience interest. One complication, however, is his friend Sejanus, a boy whose father made a fortune in one of the Districts and was thus able to transplant his family to the capital. As the only student who really knows what life is like in both worlds, Sejanus is a fervent critic of the Games, and thus his friendship because a fraught ordeal for Snow, who had hoped to use their family’s wealth and power to increase his own.
As Snow tries to navigate this tricky terrain, the reader has their own path to navigate. Knowing what becomes of Snow, how much can we invest in his budding romance or his struggle to climb society’s ladder? With the inevitable turn coming down the barrel at the reader, it doesn’t seem very worthwhile to care.
This inevitability causes the book to seriously drag. At over 500 pages in paperback, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes asks a lot of its target audience.