Review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

 

General information

Title: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Author: Suzanne Collins

Series: The Hunger Games - Prequel

Pages: 517

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 9780702300172

My rating: ★★★★½☆

Woah. Wait a second. I have to take a breath.
The Hunger Games trilogy means the world to me.
I'm gonna spare you the full story, but just know that I owe the Hunger Games trilogy a lot and it'll always be my favorite trilogy and my no. 1 fandom. So returning to the world of Panem was both weird and wonderful. Suzanne Collins gave us an addition that shed light on so many things, and I couldn't be more grateful.
 
(Minor spoilers ahead)

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is no perfect book though so let's start with this. It was a little too long. I found myself getting slightly bored a couple of times. Never extremely so, but still, and this is something I don't know at all from the original trilogy. Then again, the ending felt a bit rushed, and we're left with a couple of unanswered questions. It was a bit unsatisfying.

On the other hand, we mustn't compare this book to the trilogy. Going into this I knew it would be different. But Suzanne Collins just pulled me in again with her engaging writing style that made it hard to put the book down. It reminded me of why I loved THG so much when I first read it. I have to admit there were a bit too many songs in this one though. They always matched the story beautifully, but I could've done with two of three less.

TBOSAS is a quiet book. There's no shiny televised Hunger Games, almost no first hand experiencing the action. Instead, we see the Games for what they really are: a punishment. And it's not pretty.
This is also the story of a teenager who is torn between his loyalty to the Capitol and his love of a District girl (and gets a whole new view of things because of that). It's a character study and it's masterfully done. We get to know a whole new side of Coriolanus Snow, and he is so unlike the evil dictator we know. He was understandable, even likeable at some points. This book does a perfect job of showing his development though and the further the story progresses, the more we see Snow as we know him emerge from the pages. He is the villain we love to hate.

Plus, this book is political - but I wouldn't have expected anything else from Suzanne Collins. There are so many subtle hints not only at the original trilogy but at our real world too. It was scary and I loved it. It's impossible not to draw the connection to certain events currently going on in our world. Suzanne Collins is the queen of references and warnings.

Now one thing on the characters. It's almost funny how you can connect them to the main characters in the trilogy (Sejanus is clearly Gale, Lucy Gray partly reminded me of Peeta (only I didn't like her as much) and Snow could even be Katniss, only these two chose completely different paths in the end). But then again, they're completely their own characters with their own stories, and these stories were combined to a bigger thing. These characters get caught up in something bigger. The love story seems a bit cliché, but was needed for Snow's development I'd say. And no one in this book is who they seem.

If you expect the next THG novel, you'll be disappointed. But if you go in open minded you might end up loving this book. It's deep, but you have to read between the lines. It's an insight to the human psyche. It's definitely a book that needs to be talked about. And in addition to that it's dark. There's not much open brutality or anything, but there's this constant underlying theme of darkness and violence, and in my opinion this is what makes this book not a ya, but more of an adult novel. Also, trigger warnings: animal cruelty, abuse of human rights, hanging

In the end, I loved it. I didn't love it as much as I did THG, but in a different way. I'd definitely recommend it to fans of the trilogy, if you want to know more about Panem and get an interesting (and not typical at all!) villain back story, this is a must-read. I'm gonna end this on a quote from the Mockingjay part 1 movie that has now gotten a whole other meaning:
"It's the things we love most that destroy us."