There are good prequels and there are crappy ones. I’m not opposed to the idea of a prequel but it has to add something to the entire series. I liked The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Collins’s first prequel to the Hunger Games series. It explained why Coriolanus Snow was such a mean bastard and really contributed to the overall story.
Sunrise on the Reaping is also a prequel but it adds nothing, brings no new information and gives no fresh insight into characters. It’s a sort of a clumsy imitation of the first book in the series but with a young Haymitch Abernathy as the main character. The novel is clearly written so that there can be a movie with cool special effects. The story is predictable and quite soporific. To spice up the bleak, tedious brew of the plot, Collins fills it with inventive atrocities but piling horrors on top of each other makes them repetitive and uninteresting.
The movie will undoubtedly be visually stunning but the premise has gotten old.
Clarissa's Blog 
I feel like part of the way it turned out like that is because villains as a whole tend to make for more complex characters. Let alone unreliable narrative, which is a tremendous tool for writing from villain POV.
LikeLike
Yes, exactly. Snow changed and developed. He didn’t develop in a good direction but it was real. Without character development and in a familiar setup that’s been done several times before, I don’t see the point of reading.
LikeLike