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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 4/5
Pages: 528
Started: 30 January 2024
Finished: 22 March 2024
Summary:
Snow never falls. Capitol academy student Coriolanus Snow is the cleverest student in his year, an intelligence he uses to hide how depleted his family's wealth is. Living with his grandmother and cousin in a hollow version of his family mansion, his family's antique furniture sold to pay for food, Coryo sees social climbing and illusion as a means of survival. When his class is chosen to mentor this year's set of Hunger Games competitors, Coriolanus knows that winning means prize money, prestige, and free university tuition for next year---winning would ensure the survival of the Snow family.
Lucy Gray isn't really from District Twelve. She's part of the Covey, a band of performers without roots who belong to each other like family. But she's selected to compete in the Hunger Games nevertheless, and with Coriolanus as her mentor, with his clever plans for their shared success, she has a real chance at winning the games. Yet the closer Coryo and Lucy Gray become, the more they understand that the price for freedom--whether that means prestige in the capital, or leaving Panem behind entirely--is perhaps higher than they are willing to pay.
Thoughts:
Coriolanus Snow might be one of my new favorite characters. He's so ambitious and competent and determined, traits that render him immoral, but complexly. All of his actions are deeply logical, done with the goal of his survival and the survival of his family--or the goal of success, which would in a way ensure his family's survival too. Interestingly, he hates the Capitol for the ways it oppresses him, but he also supports it for all the ways that it can bring him prestige and success. Coriolanus is a deeply contradictory character, which makes him much more interesting that he would be if he were just a happy child turned dictator-villain by some tragedy. Lucy Gray is also an interesting character, better than her movie-adaptation version, if still a bit bland. She was a performer but she had a spine, and it was interesting how a Southern-sounding accent came through in her dialogue. She was a lot less interesting than Coriolanus, though, and her end was deeply unsatisfying.
I liked the symbolism in the book too (the sheer number of literal and symbolic songbirds and snakes that showed up in the novel was honestly very impressive: Lucy Gray the singer, Lucy Gray who escaped snakes as weapons several times; Coriolanus the jealous betrayer, who used songbirds to betray a friend who who ended up the victor, singing and spinning stories to suit his own desires) but the plot itself felt unbalanced. Three-fifths of the book was taken up by the Capitol and the Hunger Games, one fifth was Coriolanus's time as a Peacekeeper in District 12, and the final fifth was Coriolanus's running away with Lucy Gray. The lack of closure at the end of the run was very frustrating. It did make more sense than that portions' portrayal in the movie, and I really liked Coriolanus' re-integration into the Capitol after, but I do wonder why Collins structured the novel the way it did.
That being said, this was a very immersive and interesting book. Suzanne Collins is a talented author who writes complicated and interesting characters into an immersive world to create a story that is both fun to read and a clever and multi-layered critical commentary on our world, and I'm very glad I finally got around to reading this book.