MixedEntertainment Weekly... the author returns to Snow\'s youth with a song in her heart and acid in her veins. The prequel is stranger than its predecessors, and funnier, overlong, dangerously goofy. It grasps shamelessly for social meaning and conjures a vampiric spell ... At worst, what follows is an undigested lesson plan for the whole Hunger Games idea, clashing exposition with familiar story beats. At best, it table-flips the trilogy\'s striving into an anti-morality tale of consuming ambition: Mr. Ripley Goes to Washington ... The first and best act of Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes carves into an amoral world of preening wealth and corrosive power ... The storytelling itself trends desperate at times. Chapters close on violent cliffhangers that edge into parody ... I admire the ambitions, but all the explicit philosophy reflects another prequel problem: the urge to explain what was once so vividly felt. The expository impulse brings momentum to a halt ... runs over 500 pages, and at one point it almost seems to become a different novel. There are too many folk music interludes, some ludicrous franchise callbacks, and a genuinely awe-inspiring final setpiece ... Collins still has a gift for horrorshow scene-setting, and there\'s a renewed political edge ... On the level of pure pulp, this book may satisfy any readers who want their Hunger Games to have, well, Hunger Games ... a major work with major flaws, but it sure gives you a lot to chew on.
George R. R. Martin
RaveEntertainment WeeklyDragons is...a brilliantly unified work: Each character is struggling, in his or her own way, to create order out of chaos ... This is top-notch kitchen-sink storytelling—part straightforward pulp, part high fantasy—that will leave you thirsty for more ... When the writing is this good, it’s worth the wait.
Suzanne Collins
RaveEntertainment WeeklyMockingjay is a towering achievement, a brilliant conclusion to a popular narrative that attacks its own popularity, a dark and sad and funny and above all angry work of political theater ... What strikes you most of all, when you read Mockingjay, is Collins’ absolute clarity of purpose. We are used to endings that stumble, desperate for catharsis, overstuffed with final-act hyperbole. Collins refuses catharsis, sidesteps hyperbole ... Mockingjay is a book that does not believe in heroes — a book, actually, that is about how most popular notions of \'heroism\' are constructed by powerful people and marketed to less powerful people.
Robert Caro
PositiveEntertainment WeeklyPassage is a bit less satisfying than the earlier volumes. The bifurcated, set-piece-heavy structure makes for a messy narrative, and there’s a sense that Caro is mostly teeing up his grand finale...But this is an addictive read, written in glorious prose that suggests the world’s most diligent beat reporter channeling William Faulkner...an essential document of a turning point in American history.
George R.R. Martin
RaveEntertainment Weekly\"I love [this book] so much. Fire & Blood is Martin Unbound — imperfect by nature, a great big pile of story — and I couldn’t put it down ... In the wrong hands, all these semantics could be a parody of doddering historiography — or worse, the kind of High Pedantry you sometimes found in comment boards about Star Trek chronologies. Instead, the thrill of Fire & Blood is the thrill of all Martin’s fantasy work: familiar myths debunked, the whole trope table flipped ... There’s such a detail-drunk quality to the writing here, though, and a fabulous forward motion. Certain incidents resemble classically burly fantasy stuff: airborne dragon duels, swordplay diplomacy. But Martin has a love for realpolitik soap opera: There’s a government initiative to find one gloomy king a wife, and the fate of the realm depends on who gets pregnant when. There are throwaway images so surreal they could only properly exist in this half-sketched, heavily described format ... Heavy stuff, but Fire & Blood flies.\
Alan Moore
PositiveEntertainment WeeklyDon’t expect subtlety; Moore is an angry old man who writes like an angry young man. Jerusalem is a love song for a vanished neighborhood, and a battle cry for an embattled class left behind by centuries of powermongers and tyrants and corporations and New Labour. It took a decade to write this book, but it feels uncannily well-timed for this Brexit year ... although Jerusalem is a very strange text – maybe unfinished by its very nature, frequently weighed down with self-importance – Jerusalem soars high on the wings of the author’s psychedelic imagination. His bighearted passion for his people, his city, and the whole monstrous endeavor of the human condition is infectious.
