The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Book Club Questions: 20 Discussion Questions for Suzanne Collins's Novel

The Short Version

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Suzanne Collins’s 2020 prequel to The Hunger Games, follows eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow decades before Katniss. His family once had money and now hides its poverty behind a penthouse with cracked walls. His way out is mentoring a tribute in the tenth Hunger Games, and he is assigned Lucy Gray Baird, a singer from District Twelve. It is a good club pick because it asks whether a villain can be written sympathetically without being excused.

Below are twenty questions: ten you can use before everyone has finished the book, and ten that spoil the ending. Our review scores it four out of five, praising Snow as a character and the ideas but criticizing the long middle and the rushed last act.

Before You Start: Content Notes For Your Group

The book includes war violence, children killing children, executions, hunger and starvation, grief, bullying and plenty of alcohol use. It is shelved as young adult, but it is darker and more disturbing than the original trilogy in places.

Spoiler-Free Questions

1. The Games in the tenth year are crude: a crumbling stadium, tributes kept in a zoo cage, and sponsors a brand new idea. What does this early version of the Games tell you about how the later ones came to be?
2. Collins stays inside Snow’s head, where he counts every risk and rehearses every smile. How did it feel to read from the perspective of a character you know becomes a tyrant?
3. Snow is terrified of being found out as poor. How much of his behavior in the first part is about money, and how much about pride?
4. The mentors are teenagers who treat the Games like a group project with a grade. Why is that casual cruelty more disturbing than a speech from a villain?
5. Lucy Gray belongs to the Covey, traveling musicians who ended up in District Twelve, and she understands an audience better than anyone in the Capitol. How did she win you over, if she did?
6. Because we only see Lucy Gray through Snow’s eyes, she can feel like a mystery rather than a person. Did that work for you?
7. Tigris, Snow’s cousin, sews, schemes and keeps the family afloat, and the Grandma’am still sings the anthem out the window. What do they give Snow to protect?
8. Sejanus Plinth is rich, born in District Two, and cannot stop caring about people the Capitol has decided not to see. Why does the book make him Snow’s opposite?
9. Doctor Gaul believes humans need control, while Sejanus believes the opposite. Which view pulled at you more?
10. The book runs about five hundred pages in three parts: the Mentor, the Prize and the Peacekeeper. Did the long middle drag for you, as our review says?

Spoiler Questions (Finish The Book First)

11. In the shed behind the Hob, Snow fires a Peacekeeper rifle and kills the mayor’s daughter, Mayfair Lipp. How did you read that moment, as panic or choice?
12. Snow secretly records Sejanus’s escape plan on a jabberjay and lets it reach Doctor Gaul, and Sejanus is hanged. What does this say about Snow’s idea of loyalty?
13. Lucy Gray sings Snow a song and says she is running north, and he says he will go with her. Did you believe he would?
14. At the lake, Snow finds the sack of guns and realizes the only witness is Lucy Gray. When she picks up a long knife and says she is going to dig for katniss, who is afraid of whom?
15. Snow jokes that the third person he killed that summer was himself, the old Snow. Why does Lucy Gray notice that his answer is too smooth?
16. Snow tracks her to the orange scarf, is struck by a snake that turns out not to be venomous, and fires into the woods. What happened to Lucy Gray?
17. After a faint cry, she sings The Hanging Tree and the mockingjays take it up. Is the song a sign she is alive?
18. The epilogue ends with Snow poisoning Dean Highbottom, and the last line is that Snow lands on top. Did the last act feel rushed, as our review says?
19. The book never shows Lucy Gray die, though it shows several other deaths on the page. Why leave her fate open?
20. The mystery points back to the Wordsworth poem Lucy Gray, whose heroine’s footprints stop in the middle of a bridge. How does the poem shape what we are meant to think?

About The Film

The book was adapted into a film released in November 2023, with Tom Blyth as Snow and Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray. Your group may like to compare how the songs and the zoo cage scene look on screen with how they read on the page.

What To Read Next

Our review gives the spoiler-free verdict, and our ending explained page lays out the clues to what happened to Lucy Gray chapter by chapter, with a ranking of three theories. Our books-like-it list points to more dark character studies, and the review suggests Lord of the Flies, Brave New World and Wicked. Sunrise on the Reaping continues Collins’s history of Panem.