My hate for Ballad of Songbird and Snakes

   

My Hate for Ballad of Songbird and Snake

 I love the hunger games series. Well, the first 3 that is. The Ballad of the Songbirds and Snakes was a very different, difficult, experience. I hated so much about this book, so prepare yourself for a very negative book report.  

The concept of the book seemed interesting, getting to see what the villain of the series, President Coriolanus Snow, thought about and what he grew from. But as soon as I started to read I realized that I wouldn’t get any insights from Snow, as it was in 3rd person. This is more of a preference thing but I always think a book is better when I get to understand what the character is thinking. If the book wasn’t written in 3rd person then I might have gotten to understand why Snow did some of the things he did. Another thing I didn’t understand was why Snow didn’t have any personality, he felt like a blank slate. I didn’t care about his character like I did for Katniss and Peeta. It also felt like Snow was just kind of a horrible person from the beginning which didn’t add much depth to his character. When I was going into this book I thought Snow would slowly turn into this horrible, evil guy but he basically just turned from a bad guy to an even worse guy. 

Honestly, I hate to say it but this book was as interesting as watching paint dry.

However! I loved Sunrise on the Reaping. It added back everything from the first 3 that was missing in the Ballad of Songbirds and Snake. Haymitch’s character had empathy and a really sad backstory. It was also written in 1st person which I liked a lot. Haymitch’s character reminded me of Peeta which I automatically liked (Team Peeta forever). The Hunger Game in the book was also 10 times more interesting than the games in Ballad of Songbird and Snake. The book also added back the emotion that was really lacking in Ballad. I also loved or hated all of the characters which was definitely better then Ballad as I just didn’t care about any of them.

As you can see, I have strong feelings about these books but overall I still love The Hunger Games, I just forget that the 4th one exists. I’ve also heard that for Ballad you either love or hate it so I would be curious to know why people love this book and what makes it interesting.

Thanks for reading my rant of a book review.

-Eva Gleason