Is Suzanne Collins destroying her legacy?

Suzanne Collins wrote one of the best YA series of the last decade. "The Hunger Games" was a thought provoking series commenting on the horrifying way we commodify violence - especially in relation to children and how we as a society have become numb to it. Now Collins is releasing a new book in the "The Hunger Games" universe called "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" about Coriolanus Snow as a young man, when the Hunger Games were still a new and shiny murder reality show.

Entertainment Weekly just released an excerpt from the book - if you're interested you can read it here - and I'm not too sure this book is a good idea. Releasing a book from the point of view of the most privileged group of people feels like the equivalent of reading a book written by a white guy during the Civil Rights Movement. It's a voice we don't really need to hear.

While people were dying, Snow sat safely from the Capitol and never once had to fear for his life in the world Collins created. Eventually, when his life is under threat it's because of the power that he wields as the head of a totalitarian regime.

It seems like Collins is pulling a J.K. Rowling and extending her series in a way that disappoints, confuses, and enrages fans. With every tweet Rowling chips away at the legacy of Harry Potter, every announcement, every new reveal, brings criticism that Rowling never seems prepared for. This is where believing in The Author is Dead theory comes in handy. It's a literary criticism that debates that the intention of the author doesn't matter, only what's in the text.

The difference here is that Collins doesn't really tweet and stays relatively under the radar unlike Rowling. While what Rowling does feels like a vie for attention and to stay relevant, Collins doesn't even have a Twitter account. It doesn't make sense that Collins would write a book like this and not know exactly what she's doing.

This new book could go horribly wrong. Entertainment Weekly wrote that this book paints Snow as the hero of the story. While it's true that most villains don't start out as villains Snow is the epitome of privilege. We can imagine exactly how a privileged guy like Snow rose to power. "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" has potential to be another "Joker," painting Snow as an inevitability because of his environment, because of his upbringing, because society forced him to be the way that he was. However, even with all this stacked against her, I have faith in Collins.

Collins did not pull any punches in her original trilogy. "The Hunger Games" was meant to be a terrible depiction of the deaths of children at the hands of their government. Collins made sure that we knew how awful every aspect of the Games were and that we would never forget it. With this in mind I can't help but think she knows what she's doing with this series.

If this book is done right we will get an origin story for an evil mastermind. We will watch Snow choose to be evil, choose himself over others, be ruthless, and take no prisoners on his way to the top. I want this story to illustrate what it takes to be cruel and awful, that it starts and ends with choosing to be that way.

I was a huge fan of the original trilogy. I don't want Collins to do anything that could possibly ruin the whole series for her fans. I choose to have hope that Collins knows what she's doing and this novel will just add a whole extra layer to the rich world she built in "The Hunger Games."