Paperback - the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

This is actually brilliant. Like genius. Critical, and scathing and thought provoking.Sprinkled with moments where your jaw just quietly drops in shock and pain but you can't do anything except keep on reading.This book is hypnotic. It had an unputdownable quality you are still unable to quite put my finger on.Hats off, this is how you prequel.The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes will revisit the world of Panem sixty-four years before the events of The Hunger Games, starting on the morning of the reaping of the Tenth Hunger Games."The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" is a look back at the early days of Panem's dystopian tyranny, and a glimpse of how Snow turned into the president he would later become. This tale is a very different one from other Hunger Games tales, whether it's the third-person narrative, the cold and ambitious protagonist, or the general feeling of hopelessness and ruin that you know is not really going to get any better.Born to the purple but raised in poverty, Coriolanus Snow is the only hope his grandmother and cousin Tigris have for any kind of comfort and dignity. He has to acquire a university prize and brilliant career in the upper echelons of the Capitol's society, without ever betraying that he and his family are surviving on boiled cabbage and old outgrown clothes. If not, the Snow family will descend into... well, being ordinary poor people in the Districts, and Snow can't bear the thought.