This action-adventure novel written by American author Suzanne Collins is a prequel to the popular The Hunger Games trilogy. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is essentially a spinoff of The Hunger Games and was released in May 2020. The novel focuses on the time, roughly 65 years before the original series, when the future President Snow is a teenager. Here, Coriolanus Snow is 18 years old and is preparing to be a mentor for the Hunger Games.
As Part I (The Mentor) opens, the Capitol is organizing the tenth Hunger Games in history, and Panem still hasn't fully recuperated from the rebellion that pitted the Capitol against the Districts. Power in the Capitol has not been fully re-established, and Snow's own world seems precariously balanced. His once-proud family now consists of himself, his cousin Tigris, and his grandmother, and they risk losing their spacious apartment to new tax laws. When the students at the Capitol Academy are given the role of mentoring the 24 Hunger Games tributes—District children and teens randomly chosen to fight to the death—Snow senses opportunities for proving his cleverness. Although Snow yearns to succeed as a mentor, to his dismay he is given a female tribute from the poor, rural District 12, meaning the odds are definitely not in his favor.
Fortunately for Snow, his tribute, Lucy Gray Baird, has a few unconventional advantages. She is a talented musician, and she puts her skills as a performer to use even during the Reaping ceremony that results in the selection of the 24 tributes. She is also levelheaded enough to collaborate effectively with Snow, even as the Games become chaotic. The tributes briefly threaten Snow's life when he first greets Lucy; a mentor named Arachne Crane is killed by her own tribute shortly thereafter. While some of the Games organizers—particularly sociopathic biologist Dr. Volumnia Gaul—see the Games as a necessary means of social control, this opinion is not universal in the Capitol. One Academy mentor, Sejanus Plinth, is a transplant from District 2 who feels intense guilt about sending his onetime District peers into the Games arena.
The dangers escalate when, during a visit to the arena, a bomb kills additional mentors and tributes. Snow and Lucy survive; tributes from District 1 and District 2 attempt to flee and are mostly killed, though Sejanus's tribute Marcus escapes for the time being.
At the beginning of Part II (The Prize), Snow and Lucy make a plan for how Lucy is going to navigate the Games—an approach that mainly consists of hiding until the other contestants have died. Snow also urges Lucy to use poison to weaken her opponents, offering his dead mother's compact for hiding and carrying the deadly substance. When the Games start, Marcus is revealed on camera—badly beaten and hanging from ropes, but still alive. At night, Sejanus enters the arena in protest, and Snow is sent after him and retrieves him off-camera. Snow also kills a tribute named Bobbin in the process.
Lucy faces off against a few formidable tributes—Reaper from District 11, an agile and trident-wielding pair of contestants from District 4—and she is able to use her evasive strategy to her advantage. Snow provides underhanded assistance in other ways; for instance, he tampers with a terrarium of deadly snakes so that they will not attack Lucy when released. The tributes succumb to disease, kill each other in combat, and unknowingly ingest Lucy's poison until only Lucy and Reaper are left. In the end, Lucy wins the games. However, Snow's "cheating" is later discovered by the Academy's Dean Casca Highbottom, who has always had disdain for Snow, for reasons that remain mysterious to Snow himself. Snow agrees to become a Peacekeeper in District 12 as a punishment.
Part III (The Peacekeeper) starts with Snow traveling to District 12 by train. Shortly after arriving at the Peacekeeper barracks, he meets Sejanus, who has joined partly in punishment and partly in order to flee the alienating, guilt-inducing Capitol. The two grow to enjoy simple pleasures—the packages of baked goods that Sejanus's mother regularly sends, for instance. Snow also reconnects with Lucy, who has returned to the district unharmed and has returned to her role as singer and guitarist in a troop of musicians known as the Covey.
This lifestyle is disrupted by hints of rebellion among the people of the district and by the reappearance of Lucy's former love interest, Billy Taupe. In fact, Billy and Sejanus become implicated in a plot to free a prisoner from the Peacekeeper compound and then seek refuge outside the district. When the mayor's daughter, Mayfair, threatens to reveal the plan, Snow shoots her. Billy is also gunned down.
Later, Snow and Sejanus go on a mission to find jabberjays—birds that have been genetically engineered to record speech and sounds with high accuracy—in the wild to take them back to the Capitol. After discovering his friend is plotting a treasonous escape, Snow records Sejanus using a jabberjay, betraying his friend and effectually sentencing his fellow Peacekeeper to death by hanging. Lucy herself is under suspicion of being a conspirator and is being stalked by the Mayor. Lucy tells Snow she is going to escape from District 12, and Snow, fearing that he will be implicated in Mayfair's killing, joins her. On a rainy day, the two of them flee into the woods outside the District, but Snow begins to doubt the wisdom of his choice. He has just been accepted to an officers' training program, he successfully recovers the gun that killed Mayfair, and his ambitions have not been fully abandoned. Lucy has also figured out that Snow was behind Sejanus's killing. Convinced that his girlfriend is now a threat to his plans, Snow attempts to talk with her, then opens fire on her. He then returns to base.
Instead of joining the officers' training program, Snow is brought back to the Capitol by Dr. Gaul, who hopes to twist his talents to her own designs. The Epilogue of the book finds Snow enrolled in the Capitol University and his family restored to glory; now, he is treated as the adopted son of the Plinths and is the heir to their fortune. In a final confrontation with his Academy foe, Snow discovers that Dean Highbottom developed the idea for the Hunger Games. However, Highbottom did not want to implement the idea: it was Snow's own father who took the Hunger Games concept to Dr. Gaul and was willing to make the Games a reality. Snow himself leaves a poisoned dose of the Capitol drug known as morphling with Highbottom, a morphling addict, envisioning the demise of the Dean and reflecting that "Snow lands on top," as the book concludes.
