Sunrise on the Reaping (A Hunger Games Novel) (The Hunger Games) Hardcover – March 18, 2025

Ok, we all knew this was gonna be sad but dang…poor Haymitch. 😭 💔 I will admit prequels aren’t usually my favorite (there’s no stakes - you already know what’s gonna happen) but Sunrise on the Reaping was done brilliantly. I really enjoyed seeing Haymitch before the games and learning more about him in general. Without spoiling anything I’ll just say this one has so many jaw dropping moments and much like THG I can’t stop thinking about it. 🤯😭The games itself were designed even cooler than I expected and were so interesting to learn about. My mind is still blown by how the game markers chose to make the arena look like a cozy springtime environment - it’s an entirely new level of cruelty. As a side note - I feel like you could read about every single game and they would be so drastically different that they would all be fascinating. (Did saying that just make me a Capitol sheep? 😳 Disclaimer for my sanity I do not support this.) Regardless the storytelling itself was great and I was hooked from the start (just like I was with THG).I loved the side characters in this one too - so much so that I was still rooting for so many of the other tributes to survive as well. Can’t every tribute be saved with some ☠️ berries? 🤣 I loved the relationships Haymitch makes and was surprised but loved seeing some of our old favorites in their younger days.“I love you like all-fire.” 💔

I enjoyed this book a lot. I loved the entire series, but this one really caught me. The story is excellent and I really connected with the characters. Highly recommended to anyone who liked the trilogy and Songbirds and Snakes.

This book is a must have for any hunger game fans. I absolutely love the hunger game series. there is certainly the continued brutality and distopian vibes seen in the rest of the books. I really liked the level of detail exploring Hamish‘s backstory. It is a little depressing, and at times brutal but I can really appreciate how Suzanne Collins gave us the backstory for Haymich.

4.5 stars, because none of the prequels have the emotional heft - nor, to be fair, the fresh ideas, newly introduced dystopia, and shock value -of the original trilogy. That said, if you're at all interested in this book, you're a Hunger Games fan, and this is a much better book than "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes". (If you are *not* a Hunger Games fan and have not read the original trilogy, stop reading and go buy "The Hunger Games" instead.)This is, essentially, Haymitch's origin story. It's very well written and feels more essential to the Hunger Games universe than "Songbirds and Snakes" did - this story adds dimension to core characters in the original trilogy and so enriches those books. "Sunrise" helps us understand how the Haymitch we see as Katniss's mentor came to be - so as you can imagine, it's not the happiest of stories, but it is moving, and a worthy addition to the canon.

Like Suzanne Collins’s most recently-published previous novel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, this brand-new book, Sunrise on the Reaping, is a prequel to her blockbuster trilogy, The Hunger Games. The Ballad was set during the tenth iteration of the games, a televised, bloody, fight-to-the-death “pageant” featuring children ages 12-18 drawn from Panem’s twelve districts. The Ballad tells the story of a young student, Coriolanus Snow, his scrabbling to escape his disadvantaged situation, his becoming a mentor to the female tribute from District 12, his risks and machinations regarding her Hunger Games participation leading to his fall from grace, and his subsequent decisions, which eventually, inexorably, lead to his climb to power.This brand-new novel, Sunrise on the Reaping, opens about fortyyears after Snow’s story, Snow is now president of the nation, and Sunrise on the Reaping begins on the very morning when district tributes are selected as tributes for the second Quarter Quell, year fifty of The Hunger Games. This novel tells the story of District 12’s Haymitch Abernathy, the sodden, sullen victor of the games who readers will instantly recognize as mentor to Katness and Peeta in the first two novels of the original trilogy.This novel opens on Haymitch’s sixteenth birthday. It follows his journey from unwitting tribute to shattered victor, supplying readers with a much-awaited back story. It is, in my opinion, worth the wait. Knowing what Haymitch experiences as a young man affords readers a richer understanding of the character’s subsequent behavior, and also provides them with a pulse-pounding, suspenseful, action-packed story similar to but distinct from the other hunger games sagas.It’s also fascinating to be introduced to characters whom readers have either known in different timelines or have heard of in connection with other characters in the fictional world Collins has created. Haymitch is a contemporary of the parents of the tributes selected in the first novel, so readers meet them as adolescents. Other Hunger Games victors, such as Beattie and Mags and Wiress, figure into the story as well. This expansion —and/or contraction?—of Collins’s world-building adds another layer of brilliance to this novel.Finally, a note on poetry and music in this book: Suzanne Collins’s intensive use of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” made me do a deeper dive into the role of music, folk-lore and oral tradition in locations where conflict has disrupted or destroyed the flow of history, or the narrative of history, at least. In the novel’s Covey family, gypsy-like nomadic musicians who figure peripherally in both this and previous novels, Collins celebrates the oral tradition of folk songs and protest anthems that resonate through the world of The Hunger Games. From Katniss’s singing her dad’s songs, to Lucy Gray’s proclaiming in song that the Capital can’t take anything away of real value, to Lenore Dove’s serenading her geese in the meadow —and being detained after singing politically-charged songs before crowds in District 12, these young women use song as links to the past, to their forebearers, carrying on the knowledge and agendas of their families and clans, and thus perpetuating the historical, political value of such music, and, correspondingly, the stirrings of rebellion that simmer under the surface of Panem.In Haymitch’s story, the disorienting, hopeless position he is in as a tribute in a year when the games demand twice the number of participants begins to mirror and then coexist with the unsettling, bewildering, sing-songy, dream-like metrical structure of “The Raven.” At first the poem is familiar—if not tremendously important—to Haymitch because the girl he loves is named Lenore, the same name as that of the poem’s speaker’s lost love. He surprises Plutarch Heavensbee (another familiar name from the original trilogy) by quoting part of “The Raven” to him prior to the beginning of the 50th annual bloodbath. (The idea of drinking to forget creeps cleverly into the narrative here, foreshadowing what Haymitch will become.)As the games disorient and plunge him into their particularly nasty chaos, echoes of the poem haunt his mind. It is as if he is performing a dirge for himself in his brain. Memories of death after death make reality unbearable for Haymitch, as he awaits his after-victory fate alone in the training center, during the surreal Capital celebrations of his win, and after he returns home to ashes and tragedy. The narrative is increasingly interspersed with stanzas of the poem. When he implores his former best friend (who readers infer will become Katniss’s father in a few short years) to take him to Lenore Dove’s hidden burial plot, he finds words from “The Raven” engraved on her headstone. The disorienting struggle to keep living with himself and without Lenore Dove compound upon his losses, and all that is left for him at the novel is the echo of “nevermore.”