the perfect portrait of me, who waited for something meaningful to happen in this book till the end* It isn't a double-barreled surname, her people have double first names, with the second a common surname.

The novel’s 18-year-old protagonist, Coriolanus comes from a wealthy Capitol family. However, his father, Crassus Snow, lost his munitions empire in the war with the rebels and died, along with Coriolanus’s mother. Coriolanus… Coriolanus Snow is from a noble Capitol family. His father was a war hero and his grandmother sings the Capitol anthem each morning. Sejanus Plinth was too precious for this world and that’s exactly what cost him his life in the end. He was too trusting, too compassionate; he saw the tributes as people and not as animals like everyone else. Sejanus was brave but also so very innocent and naive. I think he underestimated the power, wiliness and cruelty of the people he was dealing with. On the one hand that made him braver than any of his classmates but on the other hand it also painted a target on his head. Someone like Sejanus had no place in a world like the Capitol and I think the only three people to ever realize this were his mother, Coryo and yes, unfortunately also Dr. Gaul. I think Sejanus was an idealistic dreamer and I really liked him for it. But dreaming will only get you as far and he didn’t have the necessary slyness to go about things the right way. It pained me to see where his way was heading but as a reader there was nothing I could have done to stop it. Which is another reason why this book was so intriguing. It made me pull for him, but at the same time I knew he wouldn’t make it.Bug is one of Coriolanus’s bunkmates and a fellow Peacekeeper in District 12. He’s a kind, quiet boy from the districts. He comes from a district where children help in fruit orchards, so when… Familiar names keep popping up. I assume Arachne Crane is related to Seneca Crane and Hilarius Heavensbee to Plutarch Heavensbee, for example. Lucy Gray was just so ridiculous. She seems one of the few random characters to have a normal name, and yet there was something comical about the way a 'distressed' Coriolanus would shout out her name. While the narrative did seem now and again aware that she was treated as an object, the way she’s depicted seems to corroborate this. She just didn't convince me as an actual human being. At times she seemed a twelve year old Marie Sue, at times she seemed to have walked off the stage of a musical, and yet we are meant to find her intriguing?

Of course, being an Ancient Rome analogue, this society unsurprisingly has their own variation of public crucifixion. oh and using the excuse "slow build/burn" for a book that has poor writing and plot is getting old, boy hoooooo boy the writing was BAD Ms. Collins! D'Alessandro, Anthony (April 28, 2022). " 'Hunger Games' Prequel 'The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes' Gets 2023 Release Date – CinemaCon". Deadline . Retrieved April 29, 2022. The problem with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is that it doesn't know what it wants to be until the very, very end. It meanders here and there, bloated, unfocused, wordy, boring, misguided, treading the same water on and on and on, to the point of tedium. Just to get to the climax where Snow needs to decide if he wants to be good and poor and in love or bad and successful. I kept waiting for some grand twist or revelation to happen. What I got was a tiny splash of excitement after 500 of uninspired blah.

The mentor for the District 11 male tribute. A popular student who dramatically falls afoul of Volumnia Gaul. A teen born to privilege but searching for something more, a far cry from the man we know he will become. Here he’s friendly. He’s charming. For now he’s a hero.”