Summary
Part I of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, "The Mentor," begins with a depiction of Coriolanus "Coryo" Snow and his surviving relatives in their luxury apartment. Despite the prestige of his surroundings, Coryo faces a few realities connected to the declining fortunes of his family: in Chapter 1, he is eating an unappetizing breakfast of boiled cabbage and trying to improvise an acceptable outfit for his stint as a Hunger Games mentor. Meanwhile, his grandmother, the Grandma'am, sings the Capitol anthem in the background. Fortunately, Coryo's cousin Tigris is a resourceful fashion designer and has re-crafted an old shirt into a splendid garment.
Decked out with the shirt and a single, lush rose provided by his grandmother, Coryo makes his way to the elite high school that he attends - the Capitol Academy. This year, for the 10th Hunger Games, 24 Academy students will be mentoring 24 tributes, young people chosen at random to fight to the death until only a single victor remains. Each of the 12 town-like Districts in the country of Panem sends two tributes, one male and one female, as punishment for the Districts' unsuccessful rebellion against the metropolitan Capitol. Coryo is determined to mentor a winning tribute, and hopes that the winnings will reverse his family's fortunes. After all, his family's wealth was based in the now-destroyed District 13; he needs new resources to attend the University and to fit into a Capitol that is accommodating influential new families such as the Plinths, who hail from District 2.
Coryo settles in at the Academy, and the discombobulated, intoxicated Dean Casca Highbottom reads off the list of mentor-tribute assignments. The last assignment to be read off - the female tribute from District 12 - goes to Coryo himself.
In Chapter 2, Coryo faces the fact that he has an unfavorable tribute assignment. In contrast, his classmate Sejanus Plinth has been awarded a male tribute from District 2 but feels guilty about the possibility of sending a young person from his home district to die. Coryo watches the Reaping, a televised feature that results in the random selection of each year's tributes. The female tribute from District 12 is Lucy Gray Baird, and she makes a strong impression when she appears on camera - attacking the daughter of the District 12 mayor, getting attacked by the mayor himself, and singing a boisterous song. No longer downcast, Coryo realizes that he will be working with a compelling performer.
Coryo also realizes that the Capitol as a whole is emerging from a period of hardship. Though his family subsisted in lima beans during the war, he vividly recollects that even prosperous Capitol families were reduced to cannibalism during the hostilities. His family's problems also persist. In a more lucid moment, Dean Highbottom notices that Coryo is wearing recycled clothes, and Coryo himself worries about the difficulties of affording University tuition and of dealing with a new tax law that could cause his family to lose its apartment.
In Chapter 3, Coryo arrives at the Capitol train station to greet Lucy. He is the only mentor present, and the Peacekeepers - the law enforcement officers of Panem - group him together with the tributes in a transport truck. While the tributes are being brought their accommodations, a few of these young people consider killing Coryo. Lucy stops this attempt, mostly by pointing out that, if Coryo is killed, the Capitol can take revenge on the families that the tributes left back in the Districts. Soon enough, the tributes arrive at where they will be living before the Games: the monkey house in the Capitol Zoo. Coryo is herded in along with them.
Coryo is in the awkward position of being put on display alongside the tributes at the beginning of Chapter 4. However, Lucy turns their stint in the monkey house to her advantage, engaging passersby in discussion. After Coryo is finally retrieved from the zoo, he is brought to the Academy for a quick discussion with Dr. Volumnia Gaul, an elderly scientist who engineers mutant animals and who also serves as Head Gamemaker. Dr. Gaul appreciates Coryo's initiative and argues that fostering an audience for the Hunger Games is important, but Dean Highbottom, who is also present, disapproves of Coryo's boldness and places a demerit on Coryo's record.
The opening of Chapter 5 finds Coryo reflecting on his demerit - and the fact that additional demerits could lead to his expulsion from the Academy. He returns to the Capitol Zoo and finds that Sejanus has also arrived. Coryo's fellow student is guilt-stricken over being assigned the District 2 male tribute, a powerful young man named Marcus; for his part, Marcus refuses to interact with Sejanus at all. After Lucy breaks into song - melancholy lyrics of love this time - Sejanus approaches Coryo and offers to switch tributes. Coryo is tempted, but he refuses. He sees a win with Marcus as laughably easy and is instead drawn to the challenge of winning with an underdog like Lucy.
In Chapter 6, Coryo explains to Sejanus that he will be keeping Lucy, then returns home, where his grandmother voices her anti-District sympathies. When Coryo next arrives at the Academy, he is summoned to a seminar on ways to make the Hunger Games more appealing. Sejanus voices his disgust with the Hunger Games as a whole, yet Coryo floats an idea for getting the audience involved: allowing betting on which tribute will win. Coryo also begins to learn more about Lucy when she and the other tributes arrive at the Academy; she explains that she belongs to a group of musicians called the Covey and that she did not really take sides during the war. Their bond intensifies when Coryo again visits her at the zoo, this time bringing Lucy a gift of bread pudding. Lucy continues to charm the Capitol audience, persuading some passersby to offer the destitute tributes food. However, a mentor named Arachne Crane begins to mock her tribute, a District 10 girl, by holding forth and then snatching away some food. In return, the tribute slits Arachne's throat.
Analysis
How much Hunger Games background does reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes require? The book is, after all, a prequel that details the teenage years of the series's prime villain, Coriolanus Snow. For readers who are mostly unfamiliar with the later events of the series, The Ballad can still be enjoyed as a fairly straightforward account of Snow's obstacles and ambitions, particularly his determination to redeem his family by mentoring a winning tribute. Without such a win, "he had no way to afford to go to the university, which meant no career, which meant no future, not for him, and who knew what would happen to his family" (Ballad, 8). The stakes are relatable and understandably high. In fact, a reader who is not too familiar with The Hunger Games may be inclined to read Coryo, Tigris, and the Grandma'am as decent people who need assistance, not as participants in a corrupt political system.
Already focused on an earlier time period and a different milieu (the Capitol, not the Districts), The Ballad also differentiates itself from the Hunger Games trilogy with its epigraphs. Taken from political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, these quotations spur readers to contemplate the foundations of society and social contracts. Here, the trilogy and The Ballad diverge somewhat in intellectual pedigrees. While the three books that center on Katniss Everdeen are easy to compare to classic life-or-death dystopias such as "The Lottery" and Lord of the Flies, the story of aristocratic young Coriolanus Snow is situated more as a meditation on governance and control. The original source of drama here - a young man proving his intellectual and social worth despite disadvantages - was a staple of 19th-century British literature, itself referenced in another epigraph from Frankenstein. In contrast, the trilogy mostly chronicles young people simply trying not to get killed.
Some of these differences had the potential to sap The Ballad of any excitement, at least for readers who associate the Hunger Games books with fight-to-the-death adventures. Yet Collins finds ways to give Coryo much more to lose than his shot at an education. In these chapters, he deals with a short-lived attempt on his life and is rescued by Lucy's quick thinking. When the other tributes threaten Coriolanus, Lucy simply asks them whether "You got family back home? Someone [the Capitol] could punish there?" (Ballad, 45). Quick thinking of this sort indicates that Lucy is a more formidable tribute than she first appears to be. In fact, her sense of self-preservation and her ability to work a crowd, as displayed here, are more useful than physical strength in saving Coryo - and perhaps in eventually saving herself.
Although Coriolanus and Lucy have just met, their interactions convey the message that survival and kindness are not automatically antithetical. Lucy saves a valued ally when she keeps her fellow tributes from killing Coryo. Later, Coryo shows her welcome attention when he visits her at the zoo - though he is also strategizing his own way forward by meeting with her and is making sure that he has a shot at winning by keeping her fed. The troubling question is whether such a reconciliation of kind gestures and ploys for self-preservation will remain short-lived. At what point will Coriolanus, or Lucy, need to abandon an ally in order to succeed?
The early events of the novel also suggest a possible explanation for an important piece of Hunger Games lore. In the books that cover the 74th Hunger Games, mentors are District winners from past events; in The Ballad, which covers the 10th Hunger Games, all mentors are Capitol students. The attempt on Coryo's life and the killing of Arachne Crane - handled with the sort of end-of-chapter cliffhanger that is one of Collins's signatures - prove that mentoring can be a deadly assignment. By the logic of the Capitol, perhaps the assignment is better left to District residents who are already regarded as expendable, or at least as unlikely to be killed by their own people.
