Happy Friday everyone! I hope you all had a good week. My week was pretty good. I had periods where I wasn’t feeling good because I’m off my Qulipta for my migraines. But overall I’m feeling better and heading in the right direction to get back on my medication. Unfortunately because my head has been hurting I haven’t gotten much reading done.
However I’m still a few books behind on the books that I have read so it all works out. The most recent one I finished about two weeks ago was The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins. There are various lines of thought about The Hunger Game prequel. A friend of mine described it as being the uwu-fication of Snow.
While I can see their angle, I don’t completely agree with it. Yes, there is a movement to make the villains in some books more morally gray and sympathetic. I tend to think Songbirds and Snakes functions more like a Greek tragedy.
Collins is very intelligent about narrative structures. This shows in the original trilogy with the way things happen to Primrose. She is doomed by the narrative from the very first paragraph. She is meant to die, that is the whole point of the story. There can be no other outcome no matter what the reader hopes for.
Songbirds seems to function in the same way. Lucy Gray may have survived the Hunger Games. But she was doomed from the moment her named was called in the reaping. The book makes you hope she would survive. It gets you emotionally invested in her the same way Collins gets you invested in Prim.
But no matter what happens in the book her fate was always to die. No matter how much the possibility is there for things to have been different. The characters would have had to be different people for things to turn out differently.
However the characters themselves aren’t genre aware so their fate was always sealed. I also think Collins wrote the book to drive home the point of American fascism that has risen. In the years since the original trilogy came out.
On a final note I love seeing the little Easter eggs from the original trilogy. The katniss plant. The idea that Lucy Gray may be Katniss’ ancestor. Lucy Gray’s unresolved fate. I love how Collins doesn’t tie up all the lose ends and leaves us with possibilities. This book was a good four stars for me and I can’t wait to start Sunrise on the Reaping. Lets see if I agree about it being sad.
Happy Reading
Solara
Rose's Book Garden 