“The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” is a prequel to Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, focusing on the backstory of President Coriolanus Snow. It takes place in an earlier Panem and details the evolution of the Hunger Games into the brutal event familiar to readers of the original series. The novel follows a young Coriolanus Snow, who is a top-performing student at the Academy. As part of a new mentor program for the Tenth Annual Hunger Games, he is assigned to mentor Lucy Gray Baird, a tribute from the impoverished District 12. Despite his family’s fall from grace and their struggle to maintain their once prestigious appearance, Snow must navigate his own precarious situation while trying to ensure that his tribute succeeds, all against the backdrop of the cruel and evolving Hunger Games​​​​​​​​.

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