The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: Prequel

Coriolanus Snow’s family lived through the rebellion, just barely. They are in the capital and the only chance they have of sending Snow to college is if he performs well at the Academy in their mentoring program. He is given a tribute from district 12, one of the lowest performing districts historically. Lucy manages to impress everyone in her debut after dropping a snake down someone’s dress and singing a song. Will Snow be able to mentor Lucy to success or will he fail? Will he be able to fix the games and make them more entertaining or will he just embarrass his family?

I enjoyed the three main Hunger Games books, but this prequel did not really interest me. The world and the main characters from the series are what interested me. I did not really want a villain origin story after all he did to Katniss and it felt really out of place. This story was not bad, but I felt myself having to really push myself to read instead of being drawn back to the book time and again. The story might be great, but if it is uninteresting and does not have any weight to it, the reader does not want to continue. I would have loved to read about how the districts were formed or about how District 13 managed to break away. Snow was not really someone I wanted humanized.

If you liked this book, you can read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, the first book in the main series. Other books like this one are: the Divergent series by Veronica Roth, the Shadow and Bone series by Leigh Bardugo, and the Legend series by Marie Lu.