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

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

Book title: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (*Amazon affiliate link)
Author: Suzanne Collins
Genre: Young Adult dystopian fiction
Published: May 19, 2020
517 pages
My rating: 4/5

“Coriolanus released a fistful of cabbage into the pot of boiling water and swore that one day it would never pass his lips again. He needed to eat a large bowl of the anemic stuff, and drink every drop of broth, to prevent his stomach from growling during the reaping ceremony.”

It is the year of the tenth Hunger Games, and eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is given a unique opportunity to win a scholarship to university – a much-needed money, as the once-great house of Snow has fallen into ruin. The problem: he must mentor a tribute from the lowest district, district 12, and a girl no less. But once he meets his tribute Lucy Gray Baird, a singer and a performer, he is certain he can win the audience to her (and his) side.

I admit that when I first heard Suzanne Collins was writing a prequel to my favorite young adult dystopian series The Hunger Games, I was hesitant to read it (as can be attested by the fact that I waited this long before I picked up the book that came out in 2020). I usually find prequels and sequels to already finished series unnecessary. I haven’t watched the movie adaptation either, but last summer I saw a YouTube video essay about the design of the Hunger Games using this book and the movie as examples, and I was intrigued enough to finally read it.

I’m sorry to say that even though I did enjoy reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, my fears were well-founded. The Hunger Games was an exciting fast-paced series full of action. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, unfortunately, isn’t. The pacing felt very slow, as if nothing was happening. There were a lot of world-building details that could have been edited out to make the story move faster.

I’m not sure if part of the problem lies in the choice of third-person point-of-view and past tense as opposed to first person present tense. Present tense might have made the action scenes more immediate, and first person the whole narrative more personal – although it might have been harder to make Snow likable in the first person, so I understand Collins’s decision to use the third person in this novel.

What I did like was that Snow isn’t completely unlikable. His backstory made me even feel some sympathy for him, and he is capable of at least some level of friendship and care, even though most of his actions are motivated from a selfish desire for self-preservation. Snow is not a born tyrant but chooses to become one through his actions.

Since this is a villain origin story, I expected it to have a corruption arc with Snow slowly descending from the bright and ambitious student to the unlikable tyrannical villain he is in the main trilogy. However, I don’t think this book achieved that goal. For the majority of the story, Snow is a passive character, and once the pace picked up by the last fifty or sixty pages, there was no time left for the grand finale I was waiting for. The ending happened very fast, and the climax was over before it had the chance to develop into something exciting.

Another problem related to Snow’s corruption arc is the villain of the story. Every story needs an antagonist, but Dr Gaul was so abhorrent that it made no sense that Snow would agree with her even a little bit, let alone enough to turn to the dark side. A more charming and manipulating villain would have made Snow’s corruption easier to understand.

The so-called love between Snow and Luzy Gray developed fast, but I wish the book had made it clearer that what Snow felt was not actually love but some sort of obsession or desire to control and own her. There are hints of this throughout the novel, but the point could have been spelled out. I would have wanted a clearer indication of Luzy Gray’s feelings for Snow as well – does she really love him or is she also using him for her survival? Lucy Gray came of as a very manic pixie dream girl, but that’s understandable since we only see her through Snow’s eyes and not as a person of her own.

Technically, this book should be three stars, but I’m giving it one extra star for the world-building and Lucy Gray, whose character I really enjoyed. I probably would have enjoyed this book more if it had been from her perspective (and if she had come from a district we know little about from the original trilogy). Other than that, I don’t think this added anything invaluable to the world of Panem that readers needed to learn.

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