The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
A Hunger Games novel
Suzanne Collins
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: There was a time when the Snow family was among the wealthiest and most powerful in the Capitol of Panem... before the rebellion that devastated the Districts and the Capitol alike. Now, like the Capitol itself, the Snows have little but echoes of their former grandeur. Coriolanus Snow, his cousin Tigress, and his grandmother are all that remain of the Snows, but the young man is determined to restore their old fortunes. His late father always used to say "snow lands on top", after all. But the coffers are nearly empty, the illusion of wealth harder and harder to maintain among society peers, and as he nears the end of his days at the Academy he'll need a miracle to afford to attend higher education and secure a future for himself and his family. Fortunately, an opportunity has been dropped into his lap, courtesy of the tenth annual Hunger Games.
The Games - brutal annual contests where children from each of the twelve remaining Districts are forced to fight to the death in the Capitol as punishment for their parents' rebellion - have been waning in popularity as the war fades into the past. Even in the Capitol, many don't bother tuning in to watch two dozen half-starved kids, whom they barely see as human anyway, hack away at each other in a dusty arena. To try to make the Games more competitive and interesting to the viewing audience, this year the Gamemasters are assigning each District "tribute" a Capitol mentor, drawn from the Academy, to help prepare them for pre-Game interviews and strategize. Whoever mentors a victor is assured entry in the University. Coriolanus is initially dismayed when he is saddled with the girl from District 12 - a backwater of half-starved coal miners, who usually don't last long in the arena - but Lucy Gray Baird is not at all what he imagined. Feisty and colorful and full of tricks, she just might be the underdog contestant to beat the Games and win the Snows their old glory back, and more besides... or she just might be the ruin of him and his dreams.
REVIEW: I read and enjoyed the original trilogy (and watched and enjoyed the movies), but I hesitated a long while before trying this prequel. President Snow was an interesting but dark and devious antagonist, and I'm rather tired of the villain worship that seems to be so popular lately: turning evil people who do evil things into heroes (even though most of the best baddies think of themselves as the heroes of their own stories). But, as it turns out, this is not a redemption arc or a retcon that turns Coriolanus Snow into a "misunderstood" man, but an origin story that proves just how many chances at redemption or a less-horrific path he ignored to embrace his ultimate destiny.
From the start, there is something fundamentally flawed in Snow, a self-centered worldview that is blind to empathy or affection save how it serves him and his immediate family, though like many sociopaths he has learned "protective coloring" to emulate such emotions and manipulate them for his own goals. The reader sees how he is puzzled and amused by, and often disdainful of, such pointless distractions as friendship, even as he recognizes that he needs to fake it to get by. How much of this he was born with and how much was a result of wartime trauma, as his childhood was one of extreme devastation and loss and the drawn-out horrors of a city under seige during the failed rebellion (whose impact is still visible daily around a Capitol that still struggles to rebuild a decade after victory), is unclear, but the damage runs deep, for all that he doesn't see it; if one is born colorblind, after all, what does the word "green" even mean? His flawed viewpoint means the reader sees more than he does in the actions and motivations of those around him, as (most) everyone projects onto him emotions that he only dimly feels, if he feels them at all... and when he does feel them, even his emotions are warped by the cracked lens through which he views the world. Still, even he feels a certain level of revulsion for the Games and the Gamesmasters, particularly the sadistic geneticist Doctor Gaul, whose lab is full of abominations that turn even Snow's stomach. The fact that she seems to have taken a personal interest in Snow's education bodes ill for his future and hints that the poison runs deeper than one boy, but to the roots of an entire society warped by war and trauma until it actively rejects healing and can only think to seek new and more depraved ways to inflict pain. Still, little as Snow cares for the Games, the Masters, or other aspects of what he's asked to do, he recognizes this as his only chance to achieve his ambitions, so he wades in with a will, brushing off any vestigial bristling of a conscience. Until, that is, he has his first encounter with Lucy Gray Baird.
She is not actually a resident of District 12; she is actually of the "Covey", a pre-war nomadic people who traveled Panem freely, singing and entertaining, only to be trapped after the war when passage between Districts was forbidden. District folk don't embrace the Covey, even trapped as they are with them and ground under the same boot heel, nor do Covey embrace the District, and both loathe the Capitol and all it stands for, even as the Capitol sees all things beyond their borders as little more than animals. She was sent as tribute by a mayor who saw a chance to fulfill a personal grudge (and spare one of his own people), but proves early on she can be as quick on her feet and cold-blooded as Snow, even faced with near-certain death in the Games, determined to go out on her own terms and bowing to none. Snow's ambitions drive him above and beyond what his fellow mentors attempt in connecting with their District tributes, and one can see how Lucy takes his interest the wrong way. As for Snow, he starts feeling something that might, but for his fundamental flaws, be love... in another life, where he was capable of that emotion as it's generally meant. Even if he were able to truly feel for her what she grows to feel for him, the odds against them are immense, but they're both at that age where "impossible" just seems like it'll take a little longer to become inevitable. Together, they turn out to be a formidable team... but things do not work out as Snow had hoped. Even from a place of fallen grace, he still plots for a return to glory - but can that glory, that desire for order and control and prestige, ever stretch enough to encompass a veritable force of nature like Lucy Gray Baird? Even without knowing of the later trilogy, there is tragedy written all over this tale almost from the start.
Though I never truly empathized with Snow (nor was I supposed to), he made for a compelling and interesting character. In addition to showing the origins of Panem's future president, the book also explores the pivotal moments when the Hunger Games stopped even pretending to be about "justice" or vengeance for the war and began their transformation into the sickening spectacle that awaited Katniss Everdeen 64 years later. So much hinges on which view of humanity one's leaders embrace, whether they see people as generally good and decent or as inherently savage monsters who need to be collared and broken for the sake of social harmony, with no apparent room for overlap. When people incapable of understanding empathy are in charge, the latter is not only inevitable, but ensured as each generation grooms the next in their own image. It nearly earned another half-star in the ratings, barely held back by an occasional sense of wallowing in its own depravities (depravities that are all too recognizable in our own world) and stretching out Snow's journey.
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The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) - My Review
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