So this week, instead of a Weekly REPORT, I’m writing up my myriad thoughts on The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins! For obvious reasons, do not continue reading if you don’t want spoilers for this book. You’ve been warned!
I’ve been participating in a Hunger Games and Society course led by my friend Hannah. We’ve read and discussed the first 3 Hunger Games books, and are set to discuss Songbirds and Snakes tomorrow. These are my thoughts pre-discussion, so they might change as we chat in our class, but for the sake of my review, I wanted to get my first thoughts down on the page. (Also, did anyone else preorder Sunrise on the Reaping?? While there are other stories I might have wanted more (Cinna’s, Tigris’s…), I’m still excited to read Haymitch’s book!).
Snow’s POV
My first thought, having read Songbirds and Snakes several years after its release, is that it got a really bad rap at release that it didn’t deserve. People were review bombing it on Goodreads before it even released, just because it focused on Snow. To me, this encapsulates one of my main thoughts after finishing this book: most readers *do not* know how to engage with a book where the main character is a true villain.
Snow is, of course, complex – but he is still a villain by the end of the book. I think most casual readers rarely encounter books told from the POV of anyone other than the hero (emphasized by books like The Coward by Stephen Aryan, where the entire concept is a reluctant “hero” who was never really a hero at all). This isn’t to say that all critiques of this book are invalid, or that you’re not allowed to like it, of course. I just think the extreme backlash against this book was related more to readers not knowing how to engage with a main character that they couldn’t root for, one who perhaps brings some of their own worst impulses to the surface.
One of the key aspects of this book is the way Snow presents himself outwardly versus the internal monologue that readers are privy to. It is, at times, long and meandering – I do think some parts could have benefitted from a little tightening up in the editing stage. However, it’s important for readers to see all the ways in which Snow’s internal thoughts are at odds with his external presentation. This is how he tricks Lucy Grey and Sejanus and even Tigris into thinking he’s a better person than he is. It’s upsetting but powerful in the way it presents Snow’s manipulative, controlling nature – and does a good job showing readers that he doesn’t actually care about Lucy Grey, he just wants to possess her. He is, as he admits early in the book, obsessive to a fault, and that does become his downfall both in Songbirds and Snakes AND the original trilogy.
I do wish we’d gotten more insight into his eventual split with Tigris, given who we know she becomes by Mockingjay (the little hint about her preferring her meat rare felt…random and definitely didn’t do enough to explain how we get to catlike Tigris later on lol). Collins does plant the seeds of their split, however, with Tigris clearly favoring the Tributes and showing much more empathy than Snow does. I’m just so curious for more information about Tigris in general and would’ve enjoyed a book from her POV more than Snow’s, tbh.
It is uncomfortable to read Snow’s POV – as it should be. That’s the point. But I think there’s value in reading stories that force us to confront some of our own darkest impulses, especially when parts of Snow’s characterization are obviously rooted in the misogynistic sense of disenfranchisement that twists many young white men today.
I’m gonna loop back to that point, but let’s explore a few other points of note.
Villain Origin Story or Not?
I would argue that this book is less of a villain origin story and more of an origin of the Games as we know them. We do get Snow’s backstory, but I think the bulk of the book is more about outlining how we go from “a weird punishment for the districts” to “full fledged propaganda event”. Snow is instrumental in this: introducing betting, sending gifts to the tributes in the arena, requiring TVs in every household so that people in the districts can take in the horror of the games. But Gaul is also driving this: nurturing Snow’s worst tendencies, his own inclination towards understanding how to manipulate people. Exploring structurally how the Capitol creates the propaganda system that becomes the Hunger Games was interesting, especially since Snow’s POV allows us to see the thought process behind most of those decisions.
The most interesting part of this book, to me, is exploring the early days after the war and what drove the Capitol to such hatred that they would condone the Hunger Games in the first place. You don’t conceive of punishing your enemies with something like the Hunger Games unless it comes out of revenge for great suffering, and I appreciated the exploration of how we got to that point (revenge combined with a twisted woman in power).
Snow didn’t create the system; he just learns how to manipulate it to his own benefit. He was a child when the first games occurred – which is important to note when discussing his relationship with Lucy Grey. While I personally believe she was manipulating him through most of the book, I think there’s space for her to have had genuine hope that Snow could be convinced to rethink the beliefs he was raised with since they were both children during the war, victims of the aftermath. Plus, his “friendship” with Sejanus would make his outward act of being empathetic more believable. However, she sees at the end that he’s only been pretending to understand her side and quickly drops him when she realizes he’s been completely corrupted by his Capitol prejudices.
Lucy Grey Baird
Regarding Lucy Grey as a character, I feel like she comes across rather flat. However, I think that’s intention. Collins writes Lucy Grey as Snow sees her. We know he doesn’t truly see other people as individuals worth consideration, and we know he has misogynistic inclinations. If Lucy Grey is a flat character, it's because Snow has flattened her in his mind into something he can understand and control.
Her betrayal at the end of the book signals to readers that she’s not the lovestruck girl Snow thinks she is. When presented with the possibility of Snow’s involvement in Sejanus’s death, she bolts immediately. Someone who’s truly in love would question their lover, ask them to justify the action first, give them a chance to explain. Lucy Grey doesn’t do this because she knows, immediately, that Snow has betrayed Sejanus – and that if he perceives her as a threat, he’ll betray her, too.
I think that she might have invited him to run away out of a hope that he was truly changing, growing past his capitol indoctrination (hence her discussions with him in District 12 where she pushes back on his ingrained opinions), but she doesn’t hesitate to protect herself when proven otherwise.
However, the ending and epilogue felt rushed to me – Collins loves a short and sweet epilogue, and my repeat complaint is that I want just a bit more time with the wrap up. The shift from Snow and Lucy Grey planning to run away to her “betrayal” was quite abrupt and while that makes some sense given we’re seeing it from Snow’s perspective, it does make it less satisfying as a reader to not have a bit more insight into what’s going on there. I think this book could’ve been a duology but with how poorly people reacted before even reading the book, one book was probably the only option.
Final Thoughts: Snow as the Alt-Right White Male
Here’s my hottest take: we’ve had too many villain origin stories that strive to justify or explain the villain’s later actions (cough cough The Joker). And I think those can be interesting if done right. However, I think it’s incredibly important that Snow is not sympathetic.
He is not just a victim of a destructive society. His own classmate’s express empathy for the tributes throughout the games when confronted by their brutal reality. He’s surrounded by people who try to put him on a better path, who encourage him to be a better person: Tigris, Sejanus, Lucy Grey. One Capitol-raised, one District-born but Capitol-raised, and one District-born and raised. It doesn’t matter.
Over and over again, Snow proves that the only thing he cares about is securing his future, the future he believes was unfairly taken from him – the future he deserves, by the circumstances of his birth. He has every opportunity to question his path and choose something better and he DOESN’T. And that’s important.
Snow is an exploration of an internal desire for power at the expense of others that clearly mirrors the young white men who fall into the alt-right pipeline. He has the same sense of “disenfranchisement”, the belief that there’s something he’s OWED – and he will take it through violence and suffering if need be.
I’ll be honest. I put off reading this for a long time because I believed a lot of the reviews that said this book tried to justify what Snow had done – and now that I’ve read it, I think that’s a complete misunderstanding of what Collins is doing. I don’t think it’s a perfect book and it’s fair if you don’t enjoy reading it. But not enjoying a book and it being bad are too different things, and a lot of readers don’t know how to separate them.
It’s very clear to me that Collins did not want Snow to be sympathetic – she wanted Snow to be a portrait of the young white men who fall victim to the alt-right pipeline because they think they’re owed something. Because they deserve it by nature of the circumstance of their birth.
This is an important conversation to be having today, when embittered white men are driving our country to destruction as they take over the government. The fact that this aspect of Snow’s characterization has gone largely undiscussed shows how important it is, how much of a blind spot it is for left-leaning, progressive readers. We don’t need to give Snow our sympathy, but there is value in understanding his characterization so that we can better understand what’s driving young American men down the alt-right pipeline.
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