The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

President Snow wasn’t always the dictator we know from The Hunger Games trilogy. This book shows his humble beginnings as a now impoverished artifact of a pre-war dynasty. With the upcoming tenth Hunger Games’ involvement of students as mentors comes the carrot on a stick: a scholarship to university. With a ticket out of poverty dangling in front of him, but an unpromising tribute from lowly District 12, what strategies can he come up with so they both win? 

Before even jumping into this novel, there needs to be two works mentioned that this heavily draws from: Coriolanus by William Shakespeare and Lucy Grey by William Wordsworth. It is not a bad idea to familiarize yourself with these works prior to reading The Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds, though also not necessary. Collins continually alludes to these and even includes portions of the latter in the work. 

My biggest question when approaching this novel was: How do you make a genocidal dictator sympathetic? Collins answered: you don’t. This is not Snow’s dissent into villainy; from the first handful of chapters you see him with more drive than self conscious. So, do not go into this thinking it is some President Snow sob story. 

Also, this book is so unlike The Hunger Games. I will go into how in a bit, but first and foremost this is a war novel in the same way a lot of post-modernist novels are. The Hunger Games and Districts’ narratives are really secondary to the philosophizing on war. 

And therein lies the core problem of this book. Everyone and everything is used and tossed as needed for the philosophy. This book should have been two because the multi-chapter lull in between the two major arcs is both boring and unnecessary. While Collins tries to make the point of war dehumanizing people, she refuses to even humanize any of her characters to begin with. As an example, while understanding that Lucy Grey being constantly “owned” is a point she makes, and one of the very first points, it is more poignant if the reader has a reason to believe her existence as another human. Instead she is developed to be a John Green-esque dream girl, then tossed about as a philosophy device with only Collins’ agenda changing (not advancing) her story. 

With an easily hateable main character, readers often want another character to push their sympathies on. That alternative was never offered. The few that came up as possibilities were, again, whisked in and out of the story as fit the message. For a book that is 540 pages, it is a lot to ask readers to hang around that long to re-ask the same questions about war that have been asked repeatedly, posed by almost every Battle Royale style book plus generated a movement of postmodernist anti-war novels.

In the end, the novel pulls a Huckleberry Finn. No details, don’t worry, but that is to say we have the entire prior 530 pages ripped from us as if they did not matter, might as well not happened. After finishing, I wondered why anything mattered after about the 60% mark. 

As far as the positives, I did feel attached somewhat to Sejanus, though I do not believe his character was developed with the respect it deserved. There were also tons of funny throwbacks to the original trilogy that fans will like (and maybe roll their eyes at like I did). The plot line itself, aside from the ending 2 chapters, had potential if only more than the theme was developed. In the end, I wanted to like this a lot more than I did. 

Rating: ★★