Excerpt from The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

I just recently started reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins. It is a prequel to the Hunger Games series. I was afraid when looking for the publication date today that it came out years ago and I just never knew about it, but it was just released this year, so I’m not as out of touch as I feared.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes goes back to when President Snow was a boy, assigned to be a mentor to one of the tributes. While he was born into a high-ranking family, they were devastated by the war, and while Panem is being rebuilt, it is still a struggle for them to get enough to eat from day to day. He tries to keep their dire circumstances as secret and his ability to get into university on a scholarship prize hinges on his performance as a mentor.

So this is “the other side of the story.” You get to see Coriolanus Snow from a completely different perspective and to see what happened to make him the person he is in the Hunger Games trilogy.

Nothing you can take from me was ever worth keeping.

― Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the…