We Already Know How Sunrise on the Reaping Ends. That Doesn’t Change Its Impact.
Spoilers below for The Hunger Games books, including Sunrise on the Reaping.
Re-reading the original The Hunger Games series in preparation for this review, I started experiencing nightmares. Despite my generally overactive imagination, I would not call this normal. I read a lot of fiction, much of it politically prescient if not outright dystopian; if everything I consumed brought on such sleep paralysis demons, I’d call a doctor. But I shouldn’t be surprised that, now, Suzanne Collins’s young-adult trilogy began seeping into my subconscious, 15 years after I’d first turned its final page.
The lead protagonist in Collins’s trilogy, Katniss Everdeen, spends the entire series battling such nightmares as the death toll escalates around her. After volunteering as a tribute in the Capitol’s annual Hunger Games, pitting children against each other in a fight to the death, her already difficult life in District 12 becomes outright dangerous. She inadvertently sparks a rebellion. She leads that rebellion. She loses countless loved ones. Those of us who read and adored the series know how it ends, but even those unfamiliar with Katniss’s struggle can take an educated guess. Protest rarely goes unpunished.
I can’t claim to have experienced anywhere near the trauma Katniss undergoes throughout Collins’s trilogy, but I have aged considerably since I first read those books, and what struck me most as I re-encountered familiar passages was how present they still felt. I’d expected some nostalgia whilst leafing through The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay, and the same when I’d pick up Collins’s latest installment in the franchise, the prequel novel Sunrise on the Reaping. I had not expected to feel so disturbed. Or so furious.
This is the crowning achievement of Sunrise on the Reaping, which succeeds in the near-impossible task of making an well-trod story feel as intimate and visceral as its predecessors. Reaping is the fifth Hunger Games novel and the second prequel installment after The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which chronicled the youth and radicalization of the future president of Panem, Coriolanus Snow. (Like the original trilogy, Songbirds was adapted into a hugely popular Lionsgate film in 2023, and Reaping’s own adaptation is set to land in 2026.) Reaping surges forward a handful of years, set nearly a quarter of a century before Katniss’s own Hunger Games.
The story centers on Haymitch Abernathy, a beloved figure in The Hunger Games trilogy, in which he plays the role of the embittered if endearing drunk whose previous Hunger Games victory sets him up as mentor to Katniss and her District 12 partner, Peeta, for their own. In Reaping, Katniss and Peeta have yet to be born, but a young Haymitch knows their parents well. Here, Collins does a remarkable job of delivering what fans would call devastating “lore drops,” but she does so, for the most part, without resorting to cheesy or unnecessary Easter eggs. These minor characters—including Katniss’s parents, Burdock Everdeen and Asterid March—serve a clear purpose: to ground Haymitch in a familiar-but-reoriented District 12, where rebellion is yearned for but rarely acted upon.
One of the few characters willing to risk their wellbeing in pursuit of justice is Lenore Dove, Haymitch’s girlfriend and a descendant of the Covey, a group of former nomads whom readers will recognize from Songbirds. Her conviction, her music, and her love (“like all-fire,” she says, one of several Covey expressions employed throughout the book) steers Haymitch to her aid at the annual reaping ceremony, during which child tributes are selected for the Hunger Games. This year is a Quarter Quell, and the Capitol will demand twice as many boy and girl tributes as in an average year. After an unexpected execution takes place in the District 12 square, Haymitch finds himself rounded up with three other tributes and sent to spar for his life in the Gamemakers’ brutal arena.
Woody Harrelson as Haymitch Abernathy in The Hunger Games films.
This is, of course, not a spoiler: Haymitch wins. Collins first described Haymitch’s victory way back in 2009 with the release of Catching Fire, during which Katniss and Peeta watch a recap video of Haymitch’s Quarter Quell. Through Katniss’s eyes, the young Haymitch comes off as “snarky. Arrogant. Indifferent.” But what Katniss doesn’t know is that the footage she’s watching has been heavily edited to reorder the timeline of events in the arena, and to remove Haymitch’s repeated efforts to undermine the Capitol. When he wins the games, he does so not as a ruthless survivor, but as a rebel attempting to break the arena itself. And when he returns home as a reluctant victor, he pays for his revolution a hundredfold.
We already knew from Catching Fire that, mere weeks after the Quell, President Snow orders Haymitch’s mother, brother, and girlfriend to be killed. But it’s something else entirely to experience those deaths on the page. In Sunrise on the Reaping, this mother, brother, and girlfriend are no longer nameless extensions of Haymitch himself; they are characters we’ve come to know (named Willamae, Sid, and Lenore Dove), whose deaths we dread despite their inevitability. Our anticipation does not ultimately erase our pain, just as pre-grieving an ailing loved one does not ultimately erase their loss. Collins understands this well, and she uses our emotions to target our instincts for both ignorance and apathy.
In the end, Haymitch’s own assumed apathy cannot hold. He drives away his friends and few remaining neighbors, turning to “sleep syrup” and rotgut liquor as he’s tormented by violent memories and recurring echoes of “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe, which, in the world of Panem, has been passed down through the generations to become Lenore Dove’s “name poem.” In Poe’s famous 1845 poem, an unnamed narrator mourns the death of his lover, his “lost Lenore.” He is caught between two dueling desires: the temptation to forget Lenore and the desperation to remember her. His late-night visitor, a raven who only repeats the word “nevermore,” insists upon remembrance, driving the narrator to conclude that only madness awaits him.
Haymitch makes a similar conclusion—for the time being, anyway—as he wakes half-drunk from nightmares but stays alive, Lenore Dove’s final wish having “condemned [Haymitch] to life.” (She begs that he not let another sun rise on a reaping day, thus giving the book its title.) And though the word-for-word replication of “The Raven” in Sunrise on the Reaping is one of Collins’s few missteps, drawing the reader away from Haymitch’s world, the poem nevertheless carries a deeply poignant message.
Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird, a member of the Covey, in the film adaptation of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
Thematically, much of Sunrise on the Reaping is about propaganda, and specifically how truth is manipulated to trigger an audience’s emotional response. The Capitol Gamemakers edit footage of Haymitch to confirm what Capitol residents already want to believe about him—that he is a charming but ultimately dangerous rascal—and to ignore what does not suit their “logic.” As Plutarch Heavensbee (another character from the original trilogy) tells Haymitch and his allies, “People have an emotional response to something, then they come up with an argument for why it logically makes sense.” That explains the so-called “necessity” of the Hunger Games themselves: By convincing the Capitol residents to fear and deride the Districts, and the Districts to fear and covet the Capitol, the Capitol citizens are able to stomach the Hunger Games as “for the greater good”—and the Districts ultimately succumb to the resulting authoritarianism. History, as they say, is written by the victors.
But while propaganda is indeed a form of storytelling, there is a chasm of difference between twisting stories with malicious intent and preserving them for posterity. Collins’s use of “The Raven,” in addition to numerous other songs and poems popular amongst the Covey, is a testament to that fact. That a poem from 1845 would exist, in its entirety, numerous centuries in the future—having survived the collapse of North American society and the building of a totalitarian government bent on killing children—is something of a wondrous idea to behold. It is also a nod to the strength and resilience of the Covey themselves, who have taken care to maintain these stories despite the Capitol’s relentless and well-documented censorship.
As in Mockingjay and Songbirds, Sunrise on the Reaping ends with an epilogue. This final chapter leaps decades into the future, taking place in the years after Mockingjay and its siege on the Capitol. When Katniss and Peeta choose to compile a post-war “memorial book,” Collins writes that Haymitch is not initially interested in contributing. “What use?” she writes, from his perspective. “What point? To relive all the loss. But when Burdock’s page came up, I had to mention him showing me [Lenore’s] grave. And I felt compelled to tell them about Maysilee Donner, former owner of the mockingjay pin. And how Sid loved the stars. Before I knew it, they all came tumbling out: family, tributes, friends, comrades in arms, everybody, even my love. I finally told our story.”
Haymitch realizes that forgetting was never really an option. It wasn’t an option for the narrator of “The Raven,” nor is it an option for him. Choosing to forget would be capitulating to a system that manipulates such forgetfulness for power-hungry aims. Intentional amnesia, learned apathy—both would be an abdication of love.
Fifteen years after Mockingjay was released, I needn’t wonder why the series brought on refreshed nightmares. Authoritarianism is not a fictional threat. It has not been dreamed up for our entertainment or titillation. It is here and present and bloodthirsty. As with the entirety of The Hunger Games saga, Sunrise on the Reaping keeps this truth close to its heart, which is why—even for a book for “young readers”—its story is so difficult to absorb.
Yet Collins makes it clear that the war against injustice did not start or end with Katniss Everdeen. Before her was Haymitch Abernathy. Before him was Lucy Gray Baird, of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. She learned her political anthems from the Covey, who learned them from their ancestors of yore. Stories, passed down through generations—each of them sowed the seeds of revolution that are sparked during Haymitch’s Hunger Games and ignited during Katniss’s. Dystopian literature like Sunrise on the Reaping is not a manual for effective protest, nor a crystal ball predicting the future. It is fiction and should be treated as such. But it can serve an essential purpose, one that Collins has not lost sight of in her decades of Hunger Games books: Fiction keeps close what we might otherwise deign to forget. It reminds us of what we stand to lose. And, at its best, it stirs us to pick up the fight.