"The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" by Suzanne Collins – November 16. 2022

Today's Unasked for Book Review is the Hunger Games prequal book, "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes".

This was an interesting one, as the book was written after the original trilogy, and is basically the origin story of the villain Coriolanus Snow. We first meet Snow as an old man in the original Hunger Games trilogy, and President of Panem. I enjoyed the book. It does a fairly good job of showing how someone who was okay and could have been very positive and good, though he always had tendencies towards selfishness, could go full evil when taken under the mentorship wing of a psychopath, be horribly traumatized by war and survival, and raised in a totalitarian society.

I felt like the very end, with his full decent into evil was a bit rushed, simply because of the person he turned against, but was still plausible. It will be interesting seeing this on film, since a movie version of the book is currently in production/filming. There is a lot of inner monologue for Coriolanus, and I'm wondering how the filmmakers will interpret that on film.

Overall, I think the author Susan Collins did a good job adding to the Hunger Games Worldbuilding and giving the readers/audience more insight into how the Hunger Games came to be and why Coriolanus Snow acted as he did.

I do recommend reading it AFTER reading the original trilogy. This concludes todays Unasked for Book Review.

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