Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $4.65 shipping
100% positive over last 12 months
+ $9.63 shipping
100% positive over last 12 months
& FREE Shipping
93% positive over last 12 months

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.


The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (A Hunger Games Novel) Hardcover – May 19, 2020
Suzanne Collins (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
Price | New from | Used from |
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial |
Audio CD, Audiobook, CD, Unabridged
"Please retry" | $30.37 | $19.81 |
Enhance your purchase
- Reading age12 years and up
- Print length528 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Grade level7 - 9
- Lexile measure860L
- Dimensions6 x 1.25 x 8.5 inches
- PublisherScholastic Press
- Publication dateMay 19, 2020
- ISBN-101338635174
- ISBN-13978-1338635171
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
- “Well, you know what they say. The show’s not over until the mockingjay sings,” she said.Highlighted by 2,518 Kindle readers
- Coriolanus felt sure he’d spotted his first mockingjay, and he disliked the thing on sight.Highlighted by 2,370 Kindle readers
- This reaping day, like most, was shaping up to be a scorcher. But what else could you expect on July 4th?Highlighted by 1,247 Kindle readers
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Review
About the Author
Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Product details
- Publisher : Scholastic Press; First Edition (May 19, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 528 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1338635174
- ISBN-13 : 978-1338635171
- Reading age : 12 years and up
- Lexile measure : 860L
- Grade level : 7 - 9
- Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.25 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #353 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Suzanne Collins has had a successful and prolific career writing for children's television. She has worked on the staffs of several Nickelodeon shows, including the Emmy-nominated hit Clarissa Explains It All and The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo. Collins made her mark in children's literature with the New York Times bestselling five-book series for middle-grade readers The Underland Chronicles, which has received numerous accolades in both the United States and abroad. In the award-winning The Hunger Games trilogy, Collins continues to explore the effects of war and violence on those coming of age. Collins lives with her family in Connecticut.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon
Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2020
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Here's a hint: An ebook costs next to nothing to publish, and should not cost more than the hard cover!
"The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" is a look back at the early days of Panem’s dystopian tyranny, and a glimpse of how Snow turned into the president he would later become. This tale is a very different one from Suzanne Collins’ other Hunger Games tales, whether it’s the third-person narrative, the cold and ambitious protagonist, or the general feeling of hopelessness and ruin that you know is not really going to get any better.
Born to the purple but raised in poverty, Coriolanus Snow is the only hope his grandmother and cousin Tigris have for any kind of comfort and dignity. He has to acquire a university prize and brilliant career in the upper echelons of the Capitol’s society, without ever betraying that he and his family are surviving on boiled cabbage and old outgrown clothes. If not, the Snow family will descend into… well, being ordinary poor people in the Districts, and Snow can’t bear the thought.
But then he’s dealt a blow. When various young mentors are assigned to the Hunger Games tributes, he’s given the girl tribute from District 12: Lucy Gray Baird, a strange girl with a luscious singing voice and plenty of stage presence. Though he thinks she’s crazy at first, Snow is determined to make the best of his assignment, and he even begins to believe that Lucy Gray’s charm and charisma can somehow help him.
The days before the Tenth Hunger Games are cruel to both the mentors and the tributes – there are bombings, venomous snakes, torture, and the psychopathic Dr. Gaul. But Snow’s efforts to save Lucy Gray from death in the arena, based on both his growing feelings and his desperation for success, will push them both to terrible extremes – revealing to Snow who he truly is, and what he’ll do to save himself.
In "The Hunger Games," Suzanne Collins depicted District 12 as a painfully impoverished place where starvation was only a missed meal away. And in "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes," she depicts a different kind of poverty in the Capitol – it’s a relatively luxurious place full of wealth and parties, but there’s a rotten layer to this crumbling society, a sense of dark decay that underlies Snow’s world. And she reminds us constantly that the Capitol is still scarred by the war between Panem and the rebels, which got so bad that wealthy people cannibalized their servants in the streets.
Collins also switches up her writing here – rather than the first-person perspective of the Hunger Games trilogy, she relates Snow’s teenage adventures in the third person. Her prose is tense and taut, with moments of horror (the deaths of some of the tributes) or chilling sadness (“Tell her… that we are all so sorry she has to die”) spattered across it. The plot does grow less intense after the Hunger Games, when it seems like Snow has had to embrace a new life, but then takes a sharp twist into tragedy.
And though he’s the protagonist, Coriolanus Snow is never quite a likable person. We know where he’s coming from and what drives him, but he’s still a very chilly, proud, selfish person motivated by a belief that he is genuinely and inherently better than everyone else. When he’s around Lucy Gray, Collins slips in some actual human emotion, which builds up gradually throughout the book… but Collins never lets us forget for long that he’s not a good person, as seen when he talks about killing the mockingjays.
And he’s backed by characters who aren’t necessarily what they seem. While there’s the compassionate and slightly melodramatic Sejanus as a counterpoint to Snow’s more amoral approach, Lucy Gray is an elusive, mercurial presence that is hard to nail down. And Dr. Gaul is genuinely scary, a mad scientist who apparently does mad science entirely because she can.
There’s a deep sadness at the heart of "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" – a knowledge that this is a story that can’t have a happy ending, and can’t have a hero. But it is a fine dystopian tale, giving greater depth to the history of Panem.
Now you can enjoy that same villan's origin story that is completely devoid of even a tiny speck of any hope.
Wasted dynamic side characters just to prove how smart and charming Snow is.
The Anakin comparisons are a bit too on the nose. Now take away Luke, Leia, and Obi wan and you have this book.
I don't want to spoil anything but overall what I liked about this prequel are all of the interconnected pieces from Tigris to the Mockingjay and the history we read about in terms of the formation of the games. The only aspects of this book I did not like were some of the choices in terms of the plotting.
DREAM CAST:
Snow - Finn Wolfhard
Lucy Gray Baird - Sophia Lillis
Dr. Gaul - Tilda Swinton (This is the casting that matters the most IMO)
The Grandmom - Meryl Streep
Sejanus Plinth - Tom Holland
Tigris - Zendaya
The rest of the cast I'd imagine could be dependent on an open casting call which would be really cool.
BOTTOM LINE: I hung on every word. This author can write!
Top reviews from other countries

The world-building of this novel is captivating. It is set 64 years before the events of The Hunger Games and only 10 years after the war. Due to this, we see Capitol in a very different light. The city is still war-torn and rife with poverty. The Hunger Games exists, but is a primal shade of what it would later become. Everyone bares scars of what happened in the conflict and would rather forget what happened. I personally found it interesting to see Panem in such a state, especially as Snow and his class gradually began to shape The Hunger Games into something closer to what fans will recognise.
Yet, I did sometimes think that the novel was too heavy-handed with its call-backs. While some of the minor changes, such as the introduction of sponsors and betting to the Hunger Games, were nice little nods, other things were less subtle. This was particularly obvious in the final section of the story, in which Coriolanus witnesses the origin of The Hanging Tree song and gains an irrational hatred of Mockingjays. Yeah, that is certainly on the nose.
In terms of pacing, I do think that this book has the potential to divide fans. Due to its focus on Coriolanus, it is no where near as fast-paced as the other books. After all, Coryo is a stage removed from proceedings. He is not in the arena fighting - he is watching from the safety of the mentors' box. What this did give the time for was more of a character study. We followed Coriolanus in his daily life within the Capitol as he attended school and mentored Lucy Gray. This allowed readers to see Panem from the other side - a world that is far different from the empoverished life of Katniss Everdeen.
Yet, at times, the novel could be incredibly slow. While I was utterly captivated by the first two-thirds of the novel, the section after the climax of the 10th Hunger Games did start to lose me a little. Coriolanus's time in District 12 was surprisingly uneventful for the most part. While things did pick up again over the last 40 pages, for the most it seemed to be a bit of a come down after the excitement of the Games.
In terms of character, the novel was also perhaps a little varied. As a character study of Coriolanus Snow, it was spectacular. Coryo is a fantastically complex character. His empoverished upbringing and desire to protect his family could have made him incredibly sympathetic, but this was offset by his ambition and underlying nationalism. Even at his most vulnerable, there was always a sense that Coryo would do anything to come out on top, which prevented him from ever being truly likeable. As a villain origin story, I would say that this was incredibly effective. You could certainly understand Coriolanus, but you could never like him.
Yet, while there was a large supporting cast, most of these faded into the background. This was, in part, because Coryo was so self-serving that he never really paid much attention to him. The two that really shone were Lucy Gray and Sejanus. Lucy Gray made for a compelling love-interest who was refreshingly different from Katniss. While her motivations were occasionally a little hard to grasp, she was very lovable and served as a representation of how different Coriolanus's life could be.
Sejanus was also a fantastic character as he represented new money - a character unable to fit in with the Districts or the Capitol. Although his naivety grew more and more frustrating as the novel progressed, the situation he was in was terribly sad and held a mirror up to Coryo. Here was a person who had a similar education to Coriolanus, but his upbringing allowed him to see the world in a very different light.
All in all, I actually really enjoyed reading this novel. While I can see why some fans were disappointed, I found it to be a wonderful character study that added a lot of depth to the series's villain. It's definitely one that I wold recommend.

What this book is not: Fully immersive into the different districts, a full accounting of President Snow's rise to power.
Whilst I love The Hunger Games, and a fan of YA/NA dystopia, I was a bit disappointed in BoSaS. Told completely from Coriolanus Snow's point of view, it centres around the period shortly after the great war - when both he and the Hunger Games were in the process of change and development.
There was a noticeable attempt to conjoin this prequel to its subsequent time-delayed sequels, with often repeat callbacks to songs, names and references which are so blunt it feels like they have just been jammed in to 'lay the foundations' for The Hunger Games trilogy. It felt clumsy, grating, and quite superficial - with very little character development or depth - in fact, the most action happens in the last 20 or so pages, and feels entirely rushed at the end - and abruptly breaks off - making me wonder if Collins is planning another prequel-sequel - which would leave Coriolanus's teenage years behind and examine his development of the 30s-60's. It provides no content or understanding of the next three books in the series, which was a major disappointment. I had read expecting there to be some reference perhaps towards the end. This is a standalone book.
This is still an excellent book for understanding the structure of The Hunger Games in it's early development, but ironically, it lacks the charm and depth of any of the other three books in the series.

It focuses on the life of Coriolanus Snow (who in the original trilogy is a character you come to know well and dislike) it explores his younger years and the choices me hade that took him to become what he did in later books. The book also gives readers far more insight in to The Hunger Games themselves and how they came to be. Also explores more life in the Capitol which is interesting to read.
This is fantastic read for both Hunger Games fan and newer fans a like as you don't need any previous knowledge of the series to read and enjoy it.


Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 24, 2020
It focuses on the life of Coriolanus Snow (who in the original trilogy is a character you come to know well and dislike) it explores his younger years and the choices me hade that took him to become what he did in later books. The book also gives readers far more insight in to The Hunger Games themselves and how they came to be. Also explores more life in the Capitol which is interesting to read.
This is fantastic read for both Hunger Games fan and newer fans a like as you don't need any previous knowledge of the series to read and enjoy it.



To be honest, it wasn’t the best week to be reading this. The events of the real world weighed quite heavily on my mind, and so a dystopian future in which an extremely privileged, prejudiced, and naive boy whose name is almost literally White comes of age into a world-view that we as readers already know from reading the original trilogy, did not make to comfortable reading.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s actually a fantastic story, and really well written to set up the character in a way that encourages the reader to keep going despite already knowing some significant aspects of the conclusion. Collins is absolutely on top of her game - presenting the world from a new perspective, and covering somewhat familiar ground with a new twist and a lot of worldbuilding background information naturally fitting into the plot.
It’s a really really good book, and might be one of the tales that we really need in our time. But maybe, just maybe, buy it and put it on the shelf for a few months until it will be easier to read - when we’ve started fixing our world first.

My first thought is that it was so very slow: the hunger games actually beginning after around 200 pages.
Another thing is that the ‘protagonist’ (if you could call him that?’ Is thoroughly unlikeable. Katniss everdeen was strong, and stood up for what she believed in. Corolianus is weak and only cares about himself.
The plot is also weak. Corionalus did some messed up stuff, yet in the end everything seem to work out fine? Because certain people who previously had been selfish chose to instead be nice to him.