Book Review – The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

This review marks the end of my journey through the Hunger Games books. Unlike the other four, this one was a bit long in the storytelling. I guess that is what you get when the book is from Coriolanus Snow’s perspective and not someone trying to survive the Hunger Games themselves.

If you’re unfamiliar, this novel takes place during the tenth Hunger Games, a competition designed by the Capitol to punish the districts for their rebel uprising. From each of twelve districts, two victors are reaped, one boy and one girl. In the arena they fight to the death until there is only one survivor. The problem is that no one watches the games for the war is still fresh in their memory so the head gamemaker, Dr. Gaul, enlists students on the cusp of graduation to help the audience connect with the tributes. Snow ends up with Lucy Gray Baird, a District 12 tribute with a fiery attitude and a marvelous voice. He helps the audience support her and she manages to win the games with Snow’s help. Once he’s caught cheating, he is sent out to her District as a Peacekeeper. This is less a punishment than intended because the two fell in love. Once Lucy Gray finds out who Snow really is – Capitol through and through – their love dies faster than the Capitol can erase Luce Gray from all memory. Which they do and it explains why she is barely mentioned and only once in another book.

As I said, this book is heavy on the wording. There were times I found myself bored listening to Snow talk about how embarrassed he is that his family has fallen from grace. Snow does like to pontificate, and his perspective is no different. He spends so much time thinking about food, about how his family has no money to buy groceries and they nearly starved during the war, that every single meal with this man is mentioned in length. And it isn’t just food he craves. He hungers for money, success, and power as well. Food in this novel is a metaphor for all the things Snow does not have but wants.

These students turned mentors aren’t really that intriguing aside from Sejanus Plinth who once lived in the districts but now finds himself living in the Capitol as his parents grow rich over weapons sales. He turns rebel because he can’t live with what he has become while his district friends kill each other in the arena. Plinth and Snow are two contrasting sides of the same coin. Both are put to the test and side with the people to which they were born. No friendship can survive that forever.

You know whose perspective I would have loved here? Tigris, Snow’s cousin. In Mockingjay, she is so changed by the plastic surgeries she had that it makes for a very interesting character. In this novel, she has had none of that work done. She’s beautiful and empathetic and helps Snow with Lucy Gray at every turn. I would like to know what caused her to turn on her cousin later on that she distanced herself from the family name to a point where she was unrecognizable. Was she punishing herself for her part in turning the games into a spectacle? I’d really like to read that story.

Much like this novel, the film adaptation feels much in the same – needlessly heavy in the details – which is odd since the film leaves so much of the book out. The original trilogy so closely adapted the books – aside from Effie staying around for the final two movies when she wasn’t in Mockingjay – that reading them felt like revisiting old friends. With this novel, I could not connect with any of the characters and the movie is no different. I felt separated from them much in the same way that Snow was separated from Lucy Gray while she was in the arena. The film glosses over their love story while the book takes its time. Too much time. While I appreciate the backstory for Snow, I’m not sure it was needed. We get the man had a tragic background and that Katniss reminded him of someone he once loved in the original trilogy. Seeing him as a young man who cheats, lies, and kills to get ahead as his own vanity gets the better of him just makes me dislike him more. Perhaps that’s the point. To not give this man any redeeming qualities.

3 out of 5 stars. Would have been five out of five if Lucy Gray’s perspective would have also been front and center. She could have been the heart and soul of the story.