The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

I actually thought the first two thirds of this book were alright, the Hunger Games are fun (even though everything about it is kind of fucked up, it still is just kind of silly fun for some reason) and seeing them from a perspective outside of the arena was a bit novel, but maybe if I had read the original books more recently it would feel a bit redundant again.

And then the last third of the book is just... kind of boring? I didn't really care about Snow as a character at all. Maybe I'm forgetting details from the original trilogy but it seems to barely matter that he is Snow at all. This isn't even really a fall from grace story, he's kind of a shitty person on a shitty path the entire time. He briefly flirts with being not shitty, not even good just not shitty, and then decides to be shitty.

I actually liked a lot of the prose in the book, it's easy to read and it's evocative without being overly descriptive. Just nice light reading. But there are a lot of terrible story beats that repeat over and over, like Snow having a secret or something and being sure he was going to be found out, being confronted by someone, and then oh actually they didn't know and he's actually had this good thing happen! Or vice versa where he was sure he got away with something, but oh no, he's caught! The inner monologue he'd have leading up to these events so clearly laid out that it would twist the other way every time. Ugh.