I have both praise and criticism for this book, so strap in.

Let's start with the bad:

The games were very, very quick. If I'm reading a Hunger Games book, I want it to be about the Hunger Games. And there was SO much suspense lost from having a spectator viewing the games be the perspective we view from. It's not scary, and you could tell from the beginning that Lucy Gray was going to win. I would have been more surprised had she died and Snow had to deal with that. It would have been better to have an outside view like Haymitch during the 74th games. With him wondering if these kids will survive, or if he'll have another bunch of kids die in from of him. Dealing with trauma from his games. Or if the book had even taken place DURING his games. That would have been more interesting than this. And the lack of combat especially made the book drag. If you're trying to add suspense, at least try to make it look like the others are targeting Lucy Gray. She was in danger once or twice, not enough to actually make me scared for her.

The Capitol was a lot less sophisticated than I wanted them to be. The scary thing about the Capitol in the original books was that they treated the slaughter of children like entertainment. They LOVE the Hunger Games, and the Gamemakers view the games as a show for the people. The brainwashed nature of the Capitol citizens was what made their small portion of the book terrifying. And this Capitol just doesn't care. I wanted more of the scary Capitol citizens. And the Capitol was so much less sophisticated. Maybe it's because Snow wasn't at the head of the government, but after ten years, you'd think that the Capitol would find a way to get people to watch the games. I was just so disappointed in the politics side of this book.

How in the heck did the starving people of District 12 get microphones? This made no sense and it bugged me. Anytime they sang I just wanted to scream "How they heck did you get microphones when you can barely feed yourselves?" Just a little detail that irked me.

I feel like there were certain things that were supposed to scream "Hey look at me, I'm a connection to the original series, which is WAY better than this!" It was cool, I guess, but also kind of annoying.

Now on to what I liked:

Snow's narcissism near the end was PERFECT. I liked it when he was preening himself as "The youngest to ever past the test" and other things like that.

I loved the last twenty pages of the book, with him ending up (most likely) killing Lucy Gray. Him turning on her was terrifying to read and it was GREAT. THIS was what I expected from this whole book, and I'm glad we got a taste of it, even if it was only at the end.

Lucy Gray was a pretty good character, and I loved how they tied it in with her writing "The Hanging Tree", even though it was a little predictable once Arlo was hung. You could also make up an argument for it working for Lucy Gray and Coriolanus, though that is tenuous.

The cover is beautiful, and will definitely be displayed on my bookshelf.

Sejanus is a cinnamon roll and I love him

There's probably more, but for right now I can't remember that. This book was okay, but I think a Haymitch prequel would have been better. There were just a lot of things that didn't make sense, and the twisting of Snow felt really rushed in the last 20 pages. There were somethings leading up to it, but he just all of a sudden had a change of heart and turned on Lucy Gray because he didn't want to spend the rest of his life in the woods.