As a lover of the original Hunger Games trilogy, I finally got around to reading this and found it to be better than I thought! It is certainly a different kind of book since the main character is clearly a grey character who we know becomes a villain. It does a great job setting up Snow’s backstory and you can really understand how he becomes the character we see several decades later. I also appreciate the nuance with how he was written and am grateful it was not a villain turns hero story (she did a good job making you empathize just enough with snow but not so much that you actually like him; thankfully I still hate him - as you should the main villain). The writing is compelling and I found the back story of the hunger games, the capitol, etc to be interesting and different enough from the hunger games we see in the trilogy to not be too repetitive. The callbacks and references to the original trilogy were well done and I did not find them to be forced at all. The main characters (Snow, Lucy Gray) are very different from those found in the trilogy as well and show us different worldviews than those we have seen before.