![]() Thus, the chilling echoes Collins so carefully creates will have their desired effect, and none so much as that wily serpent. ![]() Like the Star Wars films, these books should be enjoyed not within the chronological order of their world, but in the order that they were released (I am quite the stickler for this sort of thing, as my heated arguments about the appalling re-ordering of the Narnia books will attest). Indiana Jones may not think much of snakes (with good reason), but they are a powerful symbol that Collins used in the original trilogy and employs beautifully in this prequel. There will be many more posts to come, but we’ll start the dance here. If you haven’t yet read Suzanne Collins’s just-released prequel to The Hunger Games trilogy, fear not, spoilers won’t crop up until after the break, but, if you have read the novel already, or don’t mind the spoilers, join me for a quick round-up of first thoughts, using the three major elements of the title, Snakes, Songbirds, and Ballads, but in reverse order (why? There are many reasons, actually, but I may fall back on the old excuse that I am an ornery mountain woman with excessive book learning). Instead of spoiling the beautiful symmetry of the original trilogy, the master Gamemaker herself brings us a prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which is both its own special sort of creature and a perfect companion to the original trilogy. In that time, movies have been made(with some of my students as extras), popularity has swelled, and my students who don’t pay attention to my constant harping on the importance of the number three in the trilogy (they are confused by four films), keep saying they want a “fourth” book. I still use the book in my classes, mainly because I have not found anything else that works so well. But times have changed over the past decade. When I first started using The Hunger Games in my college English 111 courses, it was an obscure little book, and I was the only one in any of my classes who had read it before the first day.
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