The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Themes

In the futuristic North American country of Panem, the 10th Annual Hunger Games—a televised sporting event designed to punish the 12 districts for rebelling against the Capitol, in which children from the districts (known as tributes) are placed in an old sporting arena to fight to the death—is shaping up to be the first of its kind. Despite Panem’s reliance on a state-sanctioned television channel that constantly plays on TVs all over the…

When 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow learns he’s going to be a mentor to a tribute for the 10th Annual Hunger Games, his only goal is to win. But as he and his tribute, Lucy Gray Baird from District 12, get to know each other—both before and after the Games—Coriolanus learns some uncomfortable things. Despite growing up in wildly different circumstances (the Snows are a wealthy Capitol family, while Lucy Gray’s family were traveling performers), they…

As a prequel to the Hunger Games trilogy focusing on the original trilogy’s main villain, President Coriolanus Snow, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is naturally interested in showing how Coriolanus—who’s 18 in the novel—starts to become the elderly villain readers are familiar with. But Ballad is also interested more broadly in exploring how people—not just major villains—become who they are, and whether humanity as a whole is naturally evil (and learns to be…

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes explores how trusting and loyal relationships form and function within the specific circumstances of postwar Panem. Throughout the first two sections of the novel (which detail the week before the 10th Annual Hunger Games—a gladiator-style sporting event where poor children from the districts fight to the death—and then the Games themselves), the Gamemakers (people who design the Hunger Games) and Capitol leaders institute a program so that promising…