Final Rating: ★★
TLDR: We get it, he’s evil.
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Any book that takes over six months to read deserves no more than three stars. This masochistic endeavor lasted from November 20, 2023 to May 19, 2024. This book killed my reading streak, destroyed my spirit and stole my sanity. I didn’t have the heart to DNF it because I had already wasted $10 after ordering it on Amazon (and you can too at this link), and I usually force myself to struggle rather than send a book out to pasture. Nevertheless, 500 pages later, I finished it and am here to tell the tale.
In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, we explore the sad and depressing arc of Coriolanus Snow’s rise to infamy. I love the idea of a good villain origin story, and I know there are great fantasy villains out there. (Am I scared the ACOTAR/fantasy villains won’t live up to the hype in my head? Yes, I am). I must say, “Coryo” isn’t one of the greats. I was pretty excited at first to get an epic villain backstory. And yet, I ended up crawling to the end of this book bored out of my mind.
There’s a lot of discourse these days about what makes a good villain origin story, since we seem to be getting a lot of them from classic series lately. I think the most classic origin story is the one where we end up empathizing with the villain and understanding their path (Circe and Maleficent were good example of this). I love these stories because they’re inventive and challenge me to see both sides of the story. However, not all villains are made; some are simply born that way.
It’s clear that Suzanne Collins was not trying to invoke empathy with Coriolanus at all. Instead, she exposed his cruelty and vile nature by highlighting his self-interest and false feelings for Lucy Gray. I got lost in the confusion of Coriolanus’s feelings and motives, and in the end, I couldn’t empathize with him. I’m not disappointed that I couldn’t empathize with Coriolanus. Rather, I’m disappointed that I eventually didn’t care what happened to him.
I think the way this empathy-less origin story was played out was not very strong. Since Suzanne Collins sacrifices emotional complexity, Coriolanus comes across as one-dimensional and flat. His only character traits are that he’s cunning and manipulative. In fact, most of the characters in TBOSAS (a horrible acronym) seemed one-dimensional to me, and that’s what most disappointed me about this book. I shouldn’t have been that surprised. It’s been ten years since I read the Hunger Games books (admittedly, I DNFed Mockingjay even then).
Dr. Gaul seemed to be the only character of interest. She was driven purely by evil, and she had a strong motive in trying to mentor Coriolanus throughout the book. It seemed like Dr. Gaul was the only one with a spine in this book, and she was the only person who I was somewhat excited to see on the page. Nevertheless, even her seemingly “pure evil” personality bored me after a few hundred pages. I guess I do crave complexity in my villains, but the way Suzanne Collins tried to create that with Coriolanus just didn’t work for me.
It would have been one thing for Coriolanus to be portrayed as an icon of pure evil like Dr. Gaul. That might have actually been interesting, albeit still plain. Instead, he was calculating and “too cool to care”, which was annoying to read.
When Clemensia is bitten by the snakes, Coriolanus immediately thinks of his position as a mentor, and he ends up dissing her by not visiting out of self-preservation (limiting his proximity to failure). He has some brief moments of remorse about not visiting Clemensia, but he quickly rationalizes and opts for self-preservation, and then he rewards himself for being so calculating (snow always lands on top blah blah blah). In reality, Coriolanus was very lucky that Dr. Gaul didn’t inflict the same punishment on him. I don’t think Coriolanus was as cunning as he was made out to be; I think he just got lucky and kept feeding into his superiority complex as a result.
Coriolanus’s romantic subplot with Lucy Gray seems to further highlight his selfish personality. One moment he thinks he’s in love with Lucy Gray, the next he’s compartmentalizing and internally monologuing that he owns her. I don’t think this made him a conflicted villain, or even a mastermind. Instead, I think it made him sound like a whiny teenager screaming to the world, “I’m soooo evil, look how how many devious thoughts I have, see how I’m playing my girlfriend”. At the bare minimum, Coriolanus comes across as confused, and lord knows I can’t stand confused men. At most, he’s pompous.
Coriolanus’s feelings for Lucy Gray feel forced and insincere because he doesn’t show emotion in any of his other relationships, which makes sense (he’s evil, remember?). His relationship with Tigris seems to be an exception because he shows some vulnerability in his interactions with her. However, we also know that he sees Tigris as a symbol of his family’s decline in social status. Furthermore, there’s so much emphasis on his calculating nature and his cool ability to use people to get what he wants that, as a result, I as a reader don’t really trust him to have sincere feelings, let alone romantic ones. This is a good thing, it means I was picking up on what Suzanne Collins was putting down (I think).
I wanted Lucy Gray to be Coriolanus’s enigma, something like hard candy for him to swirl around in his mouth and ponder throughout the story. Lucy Gray seems to represent Romanticism through her idealistic views, family ties, and her dream for a better life. I suppose it’s fitting that her namesake poem by William Wordsworth is considered a Romantic poem too.
Perhaps if I were to dive more into Lucy Gray’s words and lyrics in the book, I might find more meaning in her character. I thought she was supposed to be a challenge for Coriolanus, someone that would really shake him to his core and make him reevaluate everything. However, she seems to float into the story as a damsel in distress (not necessarily needing a savior), and she floats out of the story in the end as a whimsical ghost of Coriolanus’s past, all without leaving much of an impact on his psyche. She was a fleeting moment, a minor point of interest in his thought process rather than a vehicle of the story. It doesn’t sound like Coriolanus will remember her, which is pitiable and disappointing.
It is less pitiable and disappointing that this book was unmemorable, and I’ll forget about it in a few more months. I am realizing I am not Suzanne Collins’s target audience, and that is okay. It is sad that this blog post is a literary complaint, and it’s even more sad that I actually really wanted to finish TBOSAS so that I could watch the movie; now, I don’t even want to see it. I saw the trailer and while I love Viola Davis and Peter Dinklage, I got the gist of the movie and trust they made it watchable. No need to spend time proving that.
If you read the same books/share the same opinions as I do, I do not recommend this book. It will kill your drive to read and send you to Slumptown.
