Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

~ May contain spoilers ~

I don’t know I’m emotional lol. I have seen so many mixed reviews of this book. I am going to tell you right now you have to finish it to the darn epilogue. Coriolanus seems like this upstanding citizen a straight laced boy that has all his priorities straight but then we get to see how we get President Snow.

So in trying to figure out how to pronounce Coriolanus I noticed that the name comes from a Shakespearean play of a Roman general after his military success against various uprisings challenging the government of Rome. Sejanus also was a soldier for Roman Emperor Tiberius he gained power then amidst suspicions of conspiracy against Tiberius, Sejanus was arrested and executed, along with his followers. Most of the names in the Capital are drawn from Roman ancestry which seems fitting since the Hunger Games is like the Roman Coliseums. There are a lot of parallels. This book is hard to read there is no romantic breaks, or humor, or pretty prose and magic to distract you. It’s about North America hundreds of years after a World War and this is where we end up. Back where we started but way worse an elite upper class and all these districts spoken about and treated like animals. They are kept on a leash, an experiment, a reminder to obey the Capitol. The actual Hunger Games in this book was way more inhumane if it could be right before you set them up to fight to the death. The whole Capital seems very depressing and not even worth aspiring to. Dr. Gaul and her ideas on people that she put into Snow’s head, she actually did not care who she killed or altered. It’s disgusting and I have so many theories once we go into Part II with the references to katniss and the hanging tree and omg the disappearance.

Oh Poor Sejanus he made the wrong friends. On my kindle near 93% it turned into Single White Male and he just turned into a completely different person and realized what he could and could not get away with because Snow Lands On Top. By the way that motto is so disgusting and serves only him good job Coryo, bet you made your Dad proud. I rate books on how I emotionally was involved. Believe it or not if I get a very negative reaction its as a high as if I get a positive. If they pulled out a huge emotion out of me that caused me to think and to wonder than its on the same level. I hate Coriolanus to the depths of my soul from the very beginning of the book with his thoughts after Arachne that he had to get out “Being a hero at home had its limitations; he needed a larger audience.” Well he just grew on that until he got back in the Capital’s clutches. I was very close to not liking it as much but the non-romantic happy ending for him where it feels like in the subsequent trilogy he got his commeuppance. Like (spoiler) someone might have survived and had a happy life.

I wrote a somewhat truncated review on my Goodreads and Bookstagram for this book.