This felt more like a redone cover of a popular song than the power ballad it was advertised as. Stick to the original Hunger Games series.
Summary:
Panem returns in this prequel to the best selling series, featuring future president Coriolanus Snow in his humble beginnings. Just ten years after the war between the districts and the Capitol, the nation is kicking off the 10th Hunger Games... but with a twist. For the first time in their history, the tributes will each have a Capitol student as a mentor. This is Coriolanus' one chance to turn his life around, and he is set on transforming his tribute into a victor. But the odds are not in his favor with his contender from District 12, Lucy Gray Baird. And while the two try to outlast their competition, they find that their partnership based on survival might be based on deeper feelings too.
Verdict: 5/10
While I'm a huge fan of Suzanne Collins original series (honestly, who isn't?), I was skeptical of this book. So many dystopian series come out with a prequel or sequel or spin-off, but few can live up to the hype of their predecessors and are more money-grabs than masterpieces... but I read them all anyway on the off-chance that they produce even a fraction of the excitement. And it proved me right.
This book was good... but not great. It was marginally exciting and had some thrills of the Games. But the characters felt like shells of Katniss and Peeta.
I know the author was trying to create parallels of our favorite 'star-crossed lovers from District 12' and to show how Snow may have been shaped to be the villain of Katniss' story. But it felt like a cheap imitation most of the time.
If I hadn't been comparing this to the original, it might have been more enjoyable. The story was intriguing and had a handful of clever moments. I loved being thrust back into the struggle for survival. The reader was given a front row seat to how the Games developed from an execution in a spectacle.
However, this story struggled to go beyond the Games. I didn't feel connected to the characters or feel any of the heart-wrenching suspense that I did in the first Hunger Games trilogy. I felt like Collins was pushing things along at a break-neck pace and throwing Snow around from mentor to lover to rebel to Peacekeeper until he finally reached his end goal of power. The pieces just didn't fit together as seamlessly as you would hope.
The ending really cemented my rating for this. The first two parts, I could have looked past the forced romance or the rushed action and said it was a good read. But the last third of him being a Peacekeeper felt so random. Spoiler Alerts from here on: when Snow finally decides to run-away with his girl (someone he's been trying to convince himself that he loves but no one is buying it except for him and her), he finds out that he does have the option to make it back to the Capitol and that he wants that power after all... so he sets out to hunt down Lucy Gray and kill her. It was just like "why? Why does it have to come down to 'I must kill her to start my new life instead.' " It just felt so bizarre and wasn't fully explained.
It felt like Collins had just taken us on this journey only to realize she couldn't have it end that way and would have to do something quick to make it fit into the original plot line. I kept waiting for her to pull out the 'it was all a dream' excuse. But the ending she tried to sell was even less-believable than that would have been.
And it left the story with quite a few loose ends. Tigris, for example, is Snow's beloved cousin and basically his sister for this novel. But then The Mockingjay finds Tigris abandoned and helping the rebels in their plot to kill President Snow because he fired her for not being pretty anymore. Those two just don't match up! At all! I could think of a few more examples, but it would be too long of a rant.
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