max theodore's Reviews > The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

weird feelings about this one. i was very excited and very apprehensive, and... in the end i'm just a little underwhelmed.

THE POSITIVES:
- lucy gray i love you. lucy gray baird i LOVE you. frankly, i found her much more interesting in almost every way than snow; i understand why this book is from snow's point of view, but man, lucy gray was the standout character here.

- though snow is also well-written! one of the dangers of writing a villain prequel is that you run the risk of oversympathizing with your villain, and in this case, when the villain of the hunger games is a fascist who makes children fight each other to the death, that, uh, wouldn't be. a good look. but of course suzanne collins is too skilled a writer to pull the "oh, but he had it hard!" card; though snow has been through a great deal of trauma, and he's far more than a cartoon 2D villain, it's also clear that he sucks. his trauma, his emotions, his (sometimes) genuine care for other people--none of this cancels out his classism, manipulation, or absolute willingness to throw other people to the wolves to get ahead. and dear god, the guy thinks he's soooo progressive for thinking that maybe one (1) district person might not deserve to die, just because she's ~not like other district people.~ it's admirable that collins made this book readable even though i did want to physically fight snow every chapter

- on that note: of course collins is better than this, too, but i am so glad this book did not do the "this guy was good until a girl broke his heart... then he turned EVIL!" thing. all of the roots of what snow will become (the desperate ruthlessness, the inflated sense of self-importance, the disdain for the districts and anyone socially beneath him) are present on the first page; the book isn't about snow turning bad so much as it is about all the worst parts of him festering.

- seeing the games develop was interesting! and being on the outside of it, looking in with the capitol students, was eerie and effective. in the trilogy proper, you're hand in hand with katniss the whole time; her desperation for survival becomes yours. but here, you have to sit with the up-and-coming figures of the capitol, watching the games on TV, and you get to hear all of the commentary sensationalizing the games and all of the capitol students acting like their stakes are also life-or-death when the most they stand to lose is scholarship money. people are dying, kim

- most importantly: the hunger games always has shit to say. the hunger games is never fucking around. the trilogy delved into the horrors of sensationalism and the ethics of rebellion; here, collins focuses more on the self-deception of elites and how they justify their exploitation of the poor and underprivileged, and also lots about the kind of worldview that leads one to do something like the hunger games (this is a text in conversation with hobbes and locke, which is clear from the epigraphs; the idea of the social contract crops up multiple times). it doesn't feel like a book that was written just to make money; it feels like collins had something to say.

THE NEGATIVES:
- unfortunately, that thing was often boring. look, this book is too long. i'm sorry. it is too long and the pacing is wonky and by the end i couldn't believe it was still going. this might be the prose (katniss's narrative voice, plus the first-person present-tense urgency of her narration, is much more gripping than snow's more detached headspace), but it also might just be that snow is an asshole, and it's much less interesting to spend time with him than it is with katniss. at no point was i excited to find out what happened to him; i was reading mostly to find out what would happen to lucy gray. the trilogy was impossible to put down; this book was hard to pick up.

- it makes sense that everyone in the capitol is a less serious character than everyone in the districts, because part of the capitol is that it's over-the-top and everyone worries about silly irrelevant things like clothing. but man, these characters were fucking cartoonish. i think the greatest flaw of this book is that collins' skill with characters from the trilogy feels nowhere to be found. people have written extensive fanfiction and meta on characters from the original trilogy who never even get last names (see cato, thresh, rue, foxface, etc; never mind characters like johanna and finnick, who get two books in the spotlight), because every character leaps to life no matter how briefly they're on the page. but the characters in this book, with the exception of lucy gray, snow, and sejanus, are palpably flatter. as
this review says:

Too many new characters are introduced, but none of them are memorable. There is not one person of Haymitch's caliber, or Cinna’s, or Effie's.

it's been maybe a week since i finished the book, and i couldn't name more than, like, one of snow's capitol classmates or explain why you should care about them. (dr. gaul deserves a note, but i can't decide if i liked her character or not; i enjoy what she represents symbolically to snow as a potential worldview, but she didn't feel particularly believable as a character).

- on that character note: tigris is CRIMINALLY underused. why did collins dangle tigris content over our heads and then give her no plotline or arc and barely any important scenes and also not explain anything about her estrangement from snow... please i want to see more of her...

ultimately, i'm glad i read this, but while i could reread the original trilogy over and over, i'm not sure i'll read this one again. i don't think it's a stain on the original hunger games, but unfortunately it is simply not of the same caliber.