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3,0 de 5 estrellasInformative. Slow. Did not fullfill my expectations.
Revisado en España el 2 de julio de 2020
Informative. Slow. Did not fullfill my expectations.
With these words I summarize the book that, at least for me, was the most awaited of the year.
Published on May 19th, this was the book that all Hunger Games fans expected and that promised to bring news and more action focused on the still-unknown world of HG.
Who created the HG? Have it always had this format? Was Snow always the tyrant we knew in the trilogy? Or rather, is this an attempt to humanize this villain?
I honestly felt that the book was far below expectations. Despite the amount of information and clues given to us, I felt that the book was boring most of the time.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is divided into three parts and at a certain time occurs the 10th edition of the Hunger Games. And that's when we realized the big difference of these first editions relatively to the 74th edition in which Katniss and Peeta participated.
And we understand why Snow hates Katniss so much ...
These are the first HG in which there are mentors and they are trying to create ways to attract public to watch this sick spectacle. And one of the most interesting parts was precisely this: realizing how even Snow himself was shaped and helped to shape the Hunger Games up to what they became, even though at first he didn't even know the real purpose of the Hunger Games.
The book is boring on the one hand, because, of course, we are not reading the narrative told by a life-threatening tribute in the arena, but from the perspective of a mentor, a privileged Capitol boy who has nothing more to lose than the its reputation and, therefore, history advances at a different pace from the trilogy.
For a book that promised a phenomenal return from this world and for which there is confirmation of a film adaptation, it should have included scenes that made us fear for the characters and it should have shown us a more evident evolution of Snow. From what I realized there wasn't exactly a turning point for this character, he was evil from his core.
A good part of the initial book tries to convince us that his situation is understandable, with all the problems of his family and his history, but there is no mistaking it. You can see perfectly, by his inconsistent attitudes, that he was always a little psychopath and only needed a few shakes to start to inflate his ego and evolve into the tyrant he became.
This book only confirmed my anger towards Snow. He manages not to have a heart and at the same time pretend to have it (but for those who have read HG, we are not deceived by his sweet atitudes). At a certain point he has an attitude that moved me ... with anger, ANGER! I already expected him to be "all Capitol boy", but it hurts to see that he only cares about himself all the way. And I think that was exactly the Suzanne Collins's goal: to epically fail to humanize this villain, because there is no way to justify his actions. Cornelius Snow does everything thinking about himself and his family name.
If only you knew the drama that was the first 10 pages because of a t-shirt he was going to wear at the mentoring assignment ceremony... That was when I realized that the attempts to humanize and understand him were going to be unsuccessful.
The worst part of this book is that you have to read it from the perspective of a character you don't connect with and expect to die (but you know he will not die because this is a prequel and the demon lasts a few more decades). What made me go forward in the book were the little things that are being told and that, as a Hunger Games fan, feed my curiosity (and the result was a lot of post-its spent).
About Lucy Gray, the girl he mentored, I confess that my first impression was not the best, but after discovering her story and why she acted like that at Reapping, I became a fan of her! I really liked the evolution of this character (as I liked the consistent evolution of Sejanus, another young man who was a mentor).
Don't get me wrong, if you are a fan of the Hunger Games trilogy you will love the little things that are given to you in this book and you can associate them with key moments in the trilogy, but start reading the book without high expectations.
And this end ?? I was amazed at the ending, completely shocked, but it continued without changing my opinion of the whole book ...!
