adventurous dark emotional sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
challenging dark sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

"Snow lands on top "

This was fairly enjoyable, definitely not as good as The Hunger Games trilogy but not so bad either.
I liked seeing Snow's progress from potential goodness to evil intentions and becoming the devil we all know, and the progress of his relationship with Lucy and all of the songs.
I also really liked finding out the origin of the song "The Hanging Tree" which I really love.
But other than that it just felt a bit stretched out and unnecessarily long.

"Nothing you can take from me was ever worth keeping."

i would give this three and a half stars if i could, but alas! i enjoyed this quite a lot, but i did have a few problems here and there. lucy gray does feel very much like a manic pixie dream girl character with her charming and mysterious demeanour and i really wish that we could have seen more depth to her. it was a fun read though :)

i’m not gonna write a full review BUT i think this book was good! not great, but good. it was definitely too long. the pacing was extremely varied and all over the place and the plot was... not really a plot? it was just Coriolanus going from one place to another and watching things happen, up until the very end which felt very rushed. i also felt the philosophical themes could have been a bit more subtle. other than that it was enjoyable! the character of coryolanus was so arrogant and jealous that i had fun making fun of him. also the fact that katniss is most likely a decendant of one of the Covey made me smile because she basically fucking kills him. so that’s very nice :)
this was so so rambly oh god
adventurous emotional sad tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
dark tense fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Complicated

didnt quite have the same emotional oomph as the other three books, maybe bc its from the perspective of the capitol rather than a district, but it was interesting to read a hg book with a different writing style and it was great to get some bg lore bc DAMN
challenging dark tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Questions were answered, understanding was delivered. Phew!

I really enjoyed the first half; learning about Snow, seeing how different he was, his connection to Tigress, seeing him actually care for Lucy, and hints of his ruthless thoughts appear more & more throughout the book.

For whatever reason, I started growing bored halfway. Maybe it was the other tributes- I didn't care about them whatsoever. The Hunger Games competition itself (not the behind the scenes work, because that was interesting) was the least engaging of all the ones in the series. I likely won't be able to remember anyone except for Lucy & Marcus in a few months. That specific portion wasn't done well enough to be memorable for me.

Snow's dull time straight after was also not the most interesting other than the thrilling moments with Sejanus Plinth. Now that's a multifaceted character that we lacked in the actual game field! I constantly felt bad for Sejanus but damn he was dumb at times.

The last one-fifth of the book though? Great! It redeemed the book from the dull middle:
Lucy Gray's realisation & choice at end, Snow truly reaching his full delusional paranoia that was lurking under the surface from the start, Gaul's master plan, the rat poison Snow used to drop a certain body!
The relief! That was a good end, but not perfection. I would've liked to witness the actual climb to the moment of presidency too in the epilogue, but alas, for some odd reason that was left out and apparently not part of the point of why so many of us tuned into this book.
medium-paced