This prequel of The Hunger Games is about Coriolanus Snow, the future president and main villain in the trilogy. As a high school senior, he is selected to be the mentor of a female tribute from District 12. With his parents dead and his cousin making barely enough to feed him and his grandmother, the mentorship provides a ticket to prizes and scholarship: if his tribute can win.

I am happy to be back to the series, to learn more about the Hunger Games universe: the beginning and development of the games, the creation of the ballads we hear in latter books, the situation between the districts and the capital.

We all know Coriolanus as an evil dictator, it's pretty impossible to paint him as a character to empathize with, no childhood trauma that can excuse him, and the author didn't bother trying to create some life stories for us to feel sorry for. Instead we learn of him as a cold, calculating teenager, who will stop at nothing - lie, cheat, murder - and will sell anything - friendship, love - for personal advancement.

Mailing off to ResQgeek who has it on his wishlist (a little surprising for me, I may say).

Sorry it has taken a while to mail out as I was waiting to ship it along with a bookbox - which took longer to arrive and ship out than I expected. Hope you enjoy the book, and thanks for all the wonderful BCinDC online meetups that allow me to stay in touch with my fellow BCers!

This was waiting for me when I got home from skiing in Colorado last night. I like reading dystopian fiction, and enjoyed the "Hunger Games" trilogy, so I'm looking forward to diving deeper in the the world of Panem. My daughter also wants to read this, so I'll probably be passing this along to her when I'm finished.

Long before Katniss Everdine, there was Coriolanus Snow, the last son of a long family dynasty that has fallen on hard times. Raised to be proud of his family and its position in the Capital, Snow struggles to hide his family's financial troubles and maintain the illusion that he still represents an influential Capital family. When he is chosen to mentor a tribute in the 10th Hunger Games, he sees an opportunity to secure his future by ensuring that he will be able to attend the University.

Unfortunately, Snow is assigned the female tribute from District 12, one of the least likely to survive, making his path to the future far less certain than he'd like. But his ambition drives him to explore new approaches to the Games to improve his tributes odds, and therefore his own prospects.

This story takes place more than sixty years before the events in the original Hunger Games trilogy, in immediate aftermath of the war, with the Games still in their infancy. In addition to telling Snow's story, we also can see the beginnings of the transformation of the Hunger Games from merely a brutal killing field into the full blown spectacle that it will ultimately become, and Snow's role in bringing about those changes.

Over the course of this story, Coriolanus Snow almost discovers his humanity, but in the end, his ambition and desire for power triumph, at the expense of everything else, including friendship and love. And we see the beginnings of the man who would go on to become the President of Panem and the face of the Capital.

My daughter and wife both also want to read this, so I'll be holding on to this for a while before passing it along.