Title: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
Author: Suzanne Collins
Genres: YA lit, dystopian literature
When I heard this prequel to the Hunger Games trilogy was written from Coriolanus Snow's perspective I was intrigued. This mode of storytelling from the villain's point of view reminded me of The Testaments. Ballad opens up ten years after the war between Panem and the districts and while the Hunger Games have been implemented as the districts' punishment for the war, the games are nowhere near the glamorous spectacle of the original trilogy. Viewing the Hunger Games is strictly voluntary (and not a lot of people watch), the games are still controversial to some citizens of the Capitol, and the tributes are literally treated like animals, transported from their homes to the Capitol in cattle cars to empty cages in a zoo. The Capitol is still recovering from the war and its citizens are not the vapid, glitzy people we meet in the trilogy. For this tenth version of the Hunger Games, high school students in the Capitol are selected as mentors for the tributes. This is where Coriolanus Snow gets an intimate look and experience with the Hunger Games. He's assigned as the mentor for District 12 and his tributes are Jesup and Lucy Gray. Coriolanus is intrigued by Lucy Gray for various reasons but his incentives to keep Lucy Gray alive center around his needs and goals for the future; Lucy Gray's humanity comes second.
Coriolanus has not turned into the evil President Snow as we know him, but the reader does see inklings of how his trip to the dark side takes place in small increments. The Snow family has fallen on hard times; Coriolanus lives with his cousin and elderly grandmother in their lavish apartment while practically starving, but the family is determined to keep up appearances. Coriolanus has mild trauma from the war (the Capitol was bombed multiple times by the rebels, his parents died during the war), and those war memories keep him determined to better his and his family's situation. While this is noble, this desperation opens him to grooming by the sadistic Dr. Gaul, who likes to genetically engineer the muttations we'll see later in the trilogy (this mentor/mentee relationship doesn't really blossom until the end of the book). Coriolanus is far from blameless though, he is sneaky, arrogant, and selfish, and these traits are enhanced in the last half of the book when he is sent to District 12 (I won't tell you why, that's a major spoiler). Coriolanus has a love/hate relationship with District 12 and we find out why he hates the mockingjays so much in the original trilogy. The mechanics of the jabberjays is further explained and illuminates how the Capitol was able to surreptitiously spy on Katniss and Gale deep in the forest. The pacing is pretty even throughout the book until the last chapter when Coriolanus undergoes some kind of mental breakdown fueled by paranoia and guilt.
