﻿-Today, we're going to be talking about A Ballad of Songbirds
And Snakes, which is the prequel book to the Hunger Games.
At the time that this book came in the mail, I was currently
finishing up the last book in The Wheel of Time series and I was
also finishing up my reread of The Way of Kings, the first book
in The Stormlight Archive, and this was just a nice little break.
I flew through it.
It was nice to have a change of pace and a change
of tone, but I overall didn't really like it that much.
The Ballad of Songbirds And Snakes is the prequel
book to the Hunger Games following Coriolanus
Snow - which I'm sure I'm saying wrong, so I'm
just going to call him Snow from here on out - is
an 18-year-old who is poor and his family is about to
lose their house and he is participating in the Hunger
Games as a mentor so that he can hopefully get
a scholarship and continue on with his schooling.
He ends up being the mentor of Lucy Gray, the girl Tribute of District 12.
This is at a time when the Hunger Games is new, it's not quite polished;
it's a lot more archaic, and they don't have a lot of interest.
The Capitol doesn't crowd around to see what happens.
They're mostly not very interested and the Hunger
Games is at risk of being canceled.
As a part of his schooling and a part of his tasks,
he is helping to come up with important parts
of what makes the Hunger Games what we see it as
in the three books that we read a decade ago.
This book is split up into three parts.
We have Snow getting to see his life, getting
to see more of what the Capitol really
looks like, and what the world looks like
than what we got in the original three.
We also have the Arena, which he's a mentor, not a Tribute.
Then we get to life after the 10th Hunger Games is over.
This is, of course, going to be
a spoiler-free review because a lot of people
won't have had a chance to read this
book by the time this review goes out.
My prediction is that there's going to be quite a few people that
are going to be diehard fans of this book, love it, really enjoy what
it does, build in the world and bring to it, but I also think that there's
going to be a large number of people that are disappointed with it.
My overall feelings for this book aren't all that positive,
but I'm not trying to discourage anybody from reading it.
You should definitely have your own opinions.
I'm just here to discuss some of mine.
We're going to start that discussion with the writing.
The writing style of this, I would say, is fairly similar
to what the writing style was in the original trilogy.
If you enjoyed the writing style there,
you'll likely enjoy the writing style here.
It does still have the telling rather than
showing and exposition dumps at the beginning
of the book like the original trilogy did, but it also still has that very
readable, accessible, simple, yet gripping
writing style that the original trilogy
had littered with very impactful lines
and scenes sprinkled throughout the novel.
I don't have any issue with Suzanne Collins' writing style.
Her prose isn't perfect, but I enjoy reading
her books so this book was enjoyable to read.
Going off of that, the pacing of this book
I think was one of its biggest faults.
Even though there were things happening
at every point in this book, I didn't find
it to be a very compelling read, and for the most
part, I was pretty bored reading it.
Now, I constantly wanted to keep picking it up, and I think
that's because I do like Suzanne Collins' writing style.
I do think that she has a very gripping and readable writing style.
I constantly wanted to go back to it, but every time
I was in it, I was just thinking, "This is really boring."
The other thing is that when things would happen,
they would happen so abruptly and then just be done.
Then we'd go back into a slower, more
meandering pacing, and then something would
happen and it would happen really fast, and then we're done.
Then more slow pacing. I really didn't like that at all.
I thought that it made what could have
been an interesting story, not interesting.
The parts of the book that I really needed more from
happened so fast, and a lot of times so conveniently.
I really didn't like that.
Going into characters, we have two main characters.
We have Snow and we have Lucy Gray.
Lucy Gray is the 12th District female Tribute.
I'm going to start with Snow.
I personally did not like following him.
He was an odd character to follow because
he came from this poor background and he was
a product of his environment, a product
of his circumstances in a lot of ways.
We got to see little things in him that were disturbing, like
the way he viewed his love interest in this very possessive
way, as well as the way he viewed the Hunger Games;
not liking the way the Tributes are treated, but not really caring enough
to want to change it and being pretty okay with the Hunger Games
overall, even though he didn't really agree
with them, he also didn't care that much.
This book is his slow descent, small
choices that he makes that are all very selfish, self-driven.
Small choices that he make that starts snowballing into the bigger
choices that lead us into the character that we all already know and hate.
For me, and I know that this is a personal thing and I know that different
people will feel different ways, I really
didn't want this perspective from Snow.
I wasn't excited about this book knowing that Snow was our lead because
I was afraid that it would be:
this character is pretty normal with a couple
of, "Oh, okay, I see how you could potentially turn bad someday Otherwise,
you're a pretty normal character.
Then snap, all of a sudden, you're evil."
I will say that it wasn't as bad as it could
have been, but I wasn't pleased with how it went.
I was really, really hoping for a backstory, kind of like
a Voldemort backstory where he is evil and twisted
and messed up from a young age, but he's also very
charming and able to hide it from a lot of people.
We can just see this twisted vindictive character that shows
himself as a hero, but he's always had a twisted character.
Instead, we have this character that,
honestly, there's some things that make us
able to sympathize with him, but he's also
clearly not a cool guy from the start.
I don't think that the point of this book was to sympathize
with Snow, but also the point of this book didn't seem
to be to just see this evil character be-- It was just this
boring slow descent and I didn't feel like I needed it.
In my opinion, Snow was not a compelling character to follow.
It wasn't a very interesting or gripping origin story.
It also wasn't a very compelling origin story.
I just didn't feel like I got much out of this book.
Lucy Gray was definitely much more of a shining point in this book.
She is, I guess you could say, a pretty typical
quirky, weird character that we tend to love to follow.
She's very uniquely and unabashedly herself.
Very confident, but also has a lot of stuff
going on behind the scenes for her.
She was a much more interesting character to follow.
I didn't die-hard love her because I did
feel like I've seen her character several
times in other books similar to this one, but I did like her.
She's easy to latch on to.
I enjoyed following her much more even though this
is really Snow's story and Snows' perspective.
We got enough of her that I was happy with her.
Briefly, jumping over to romance.
The reason I'm going to be brief about it is because I don't
think that this is supposed to be a romantic book in any way.
Snow, the way he views his love interest, like I said, it's
very possessive and I think he was intentionally that way.
It was very abrupt, Snow just all of a sudden loved her.
Then it was this obsessive;
"She consumes all my thoughts, I must be with her," kind of thing.
I won't give away the arc of the romance, but I felt like the beginning
of the romance where he suddenly loved her was very abrupt.
The end of the arc was also very, very abrupt.
The way that was done. I did not like that.
But the point of this book wasn't the romance.
It wasn't supposed to be like a beautiful romance that was
supposed to follow, that's supposed to take over the plot.
It's not supposed to be a romance.
It's just supposed to be a part of the story.
It's there, that's how I feel about it, it existed.
I'm going to also briefly talk about the games because
it isn't as much of a focus in this book that you would think.
Overall, once again, I was pretty
disappointed with the way the games happened.
Now we get the opportunity to see the games
from the perspective of the mentor.
It could potentially be the mentor who is really caring
about the Tribute and does everything they can to help
them, or it could be the mentor who doesn't actually
care at all because he's been twisted this whole time.
Either way, it could have been a really interesting
perspective, but it wasn't, in my opinion.
Lucy Gray is clearly the only character that
we need to care about as far as the Tributes go.
We get thrown a list of names now and then.
Similar to the original, except since we're not
in the games with Lucy Gray and since we really don't
have any opportunity to get to know hardly any of them,
any time any of them died, I couldn't care less.
I couldn't really tell one Tribute from another because
we didn't get any chance to get to know any of them.
When they died or when something happened to them, it was
just this gruesome description and then we move on.
I didn't have any stakes in these games whatsoever.
I just didn't think that it was a very interesting part of the book.
Now let's talk about the ending because that's
the part that actually disappointed me the most.
Up to this point, I felt pretty neutral about this book.
I thought it was boring to read, but I also thought that
the writing style was compelling enough that I wanted to keep going.
I really, really enjoyed getting to see the games in its most
basic form when it was very, very young and not very successful.
I really enjoyed seeing Snow's influence
on the game, sometimes intentional,
sometimes not, into shaping it how we saw it in the original trilogy.
I think that that part of the book, that those elements were actually
great and did add a lot to the world, a lot to the history and it was cool.
I liked seeing the games young and seeing
Snow's influence on what the games become.
I had pretty neutral feelings about the book.
There were elements that I liked.
There were elements that I didn't like, but it's fine, until the end,
and the end may be just tip over into,
this was pretty disappointing overall.
This is still, spoiler-free, I'm not
going to talk about anything specific.
All I'm going to say is that that last third of the book I think
really just didn't need to be as long as it was, and the final sequence
of situations that happen to lead us to where the Snow ends up in the end
were so fast, so abrupt,
and so convenient that I just, "Why?
What? Why?
I'm giving this whole review spoiler for you, but I am going to be more
specific in my good reads review where I'll have some spoilers there.
If you are unsure what I'm talking about, you can
hop over there and see more specifics of what I mean.
Final thoughts on this book are not positive, obviously,
I didn't say a lot of positive things throughout the video.
I told you from the beginning of the video that
I don't have good feelings about this book.
Overall, I came out of it kind of frustrated about some
of the things that were glossed over or that happened too abruptly.
I found Snow's arc, as soon as I found out that Snow was going to be
the main focus of this book and he was going to be a mentor, I found his
arc pretty predictable from what I thought it was going to be from
the start of the announcement of what this book was going to be following.
In my opinion, it wasn't anything exciting or fresh or surprising.
It was what you would expect this type of book to be.
Along with that, with this being a prequel
book, we already know who Snow turns into,
so there were some really intense scenes
with Snow, but none of them had any stakes.
None of them felt very exciting or tense or anything because
I already knew that he was going to make it out just fine.
That's just the way it goes with a prequel;
the stakes are fairly low for our main character because we already know
that the main character is fine in the end.
Every tense situation they come across we know they're fine.
I came out of this thinking what I come out of thinking
about a lot of books that were written a decade ago
and then the author comes back and says, "I have more story to tell,"
which an author can do what they want to do.
If an author has more story to tell, they can write that book.
That's their choice. I'm not trying to tell an author what to do.
An author can write what they want to write.
They can stop writing when they feel like stop writing.
It's an author's choice, but I'm talking about how
I felt and I came out of this feeling the way I come out
of feeling about a lot of books that have add-ons
years and years and years later or prequels in general.
That's, "What was the point of this?
Did it really add anything to the series?"
Other than getting more world-building, more
of a look into The Capitol, more of a look
into what the games originally were, which
really got all that in one section of the book.
Other than that add-on, which I appreciated, I don't
really feel like this added that much to the series.
I don't feel like Snow's story was
compelling enough that it needed to be told.
I came out of this feeling like, "Why did we do this?"
I do think that it added a little bit, and that's
what the world-building and the picture
into how it used to be, and for that
I would say a novella would have sufficed.
I didn't need this many pages to tell this story.
Again, I do anticipate some people die-hard
loving this book, and I do anticipate
some frustrated comments at my overall negative review because of that.
Again, I'm just chatting about how I felt about it.
If you felt the same or completely different, I would love
to continue chatting with you about it in the comments.
I'm very interested to see how people feel because I do
think that this is going to be a book that gets really,
really mixed reactions and I'm excited to see how people
feel and what those different reactions are going to be.
Again, I don't want to discourage anyone from picking up
the book if you are on the fence or if you're excited about it.
Readers take different things from a book.
Readers like different things. You may love it.
I did not.
Overall, I was fairly disappointed with the execution.
I especially really didn't like that I felt the things that
really could have made this book great were very fast and skipped
over in a lot of instances, and the things that made this
book boring were the things that we focused on the most.
Overall, I didn't love it, but I would love to chat with
you in the comments about what you've thought about it.
I post videos every Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday,
and I post my reviews on off-days.
I'll see you guys again soon. Bye.