Back when the Hunger Games trilogy was in vogue, how big of a fan were you? Me, I was …

Forgive me. We are in the middle of the end of the world, so we’ve somehow managed to summon 2012 back. The Percy Jackson series is coming to Disney+, and this prequel to the Hunger Games was released.

As you may have guessed from last week’s post, I will be talking about that. I decided to indulge in the remembrance of my youth and delve once more into the land of Panem, to see what Suzanne Collins has to tell us in the decade since Mockingjay was released.

“A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” is a prequel to the Hunger Games trilogy, and it follows the original series’ main antagonist President Snow. We see the young Coriolanus Snow, who is from a once-great Capitol family fallen on hard times, trying to get back on track to the privileged life promised to him.

As he is an excellent student, he was chosen to mentor for the 10th Hunger Games, which wasn’t a big of a hit in the Capitol as it was in Katniss and Peeta’s time. His task as a mentor is to figure out how to make the games more engaging for the Capitol and district citizens. Towards the end of the book, we’ll see him leave the framework for the Hunger Games format we knew in the original trilogy.

Snow gets assigned to mentor the girl chosen from District 12. During the Reaping, it turns out to be this enigmatic and charming girl named Lucy Gray Baird. So, yeah, he has a lot to work with – a far cry from Haymitch trying to make Katniss more appealing and palatable.

There were a lot of callbacks to the original series in this one. I liked spotting all of the little “hellos” Suzanne Collins left for fans of the trilogy. What I really enjoyed was seeing how Suzanne Collins sort of backtracked and explain to us how everything was shaping up after the war which led to the Panem of the 74th Games. She also built up certain things in this book that are directly related to Katniss and her story, so I find it interesting that she let Snow have all these connections to Katniss.

Did I like that we were in the mind of future fascist President Snow? We see him make bad choices over and over again, but he still thinks he’s right so, yeah… that sounds fascist to me. I think what Suzanne Collins was trying to do here was to give us an analysis of how human efforts to control everything around them including nature are detrimental to the free will and reason of other beings.

I liked that we were almost explicitly told that, hey, the government is responsible for the citizens and not the other way around. They owe us the things we need to become moral and productive, and only when they provide those can there be peace and prosperity. If we are constantly placed in situations where we have no choices at all, then yeah, we go back to being rabid animals.

Overall, in my opinion as the biggest Hunger Games fan I know, this book could not have come at a better time in history. We are at a frightening turning point where all the gaps of an ill-conceived system are showing up, and unless we fix this right, we will lose everything.

I hope we all make better choices than 18-year old Coriolanus Snow did. May the odds be ever in our favor.