Sunrise on the Reaping Review: A Prequel Done Right

Sunrise on the Reaping Is the Hunger Games Prequel We’ve Been Waiting For

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was a strange choice for Suzanne Collins’s first prequel to her blockbuster The Hunger Games trilogy. Essentially an origin story for the vicious and authoritarian Cornelius Snow, the book was frequently criticized for its attempt to not only humanize an objective psychopath but also imply that the reason he became a complete monster who helped destroy thousands of lives was simply that a girl broke up with him. (A girl that he then tried to kill!) Perhaps Collins’s book was just an early, on-the-nose predictor of the horrors of incel culture, but outside of the intriguing Lucy Gray Baird, the experience was a frustrating one and certainly didn’t leave many fans of the series (read: me) hoping that this prequel well was one that Collins would return to again. Well, Sunrise on the Reaping is here to prove us all wrong.

To put it bluntly: Collins’s second Hunger Games prequel is genuinely outstanding. Its story deftly threads the needle between what we already know about Katniss Everdeen’s jaded, alcoholic mentor Haymitch Abernathy—how he won his Hunger Games, and that he returned home to a Capitol-inflicted tragedy—and his life before he became a victor. It’s both an emotional origin story and a shrewd exploration of propaganda in Panem. History, after all, is written by the victors, and that is nowhere more evident than it is here, in a book that rewrites and complicates many of our assumptions about what we know (or at least assumed) to be true from the original The Hunger Games trilogy.

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Haymitch is celebrating his sixteenth birthday when the book opens. A washerwoman’s son and part-time bootlegger’s apprentice, he dreams of little more keeping his surviving family—a mother and brother—safe, and building a life with the girl he loves, Leonore Dove. (If you couldn’t tell, this girl is a Covey, so get ready for a whole lot of Edgar Allan Poe references.) He, unfortunately, shares a birthday with reaping day, meaning that his celebrations have always been somewhat muted, given that it’s also the occasion when the participants in the annual Hunger Games are selected and dragged away to the Capitol to face almost certain death.

District 12 has only ever produced one winner, the Lucy Gray we all know from Songbirds and Snakes, but her existence—heck even her name—has been seemingly struck from history in the years that have followed her victory. This year’s reaping is doubly grim, given that it’s been 50 years since the districts’ failed rebellion, which makes the forthcoming event a Quarter Quell. This means double the number of children will be selected via lottery from each district and forced to fight to the death. In the face of that, no one’s odds seem particularly in their favor. It’s a testament to Collins’s talent that Sunrise manages to make Haymitch’s reaping feel as tense as it does—he’s not immediately chosen, nor does he volunteer, but his involvement is the first of many difficult situations that feel almost chokingly unfair.

What follows is familiar to fans of this series: The tributes’ journey to Panem, the revelation of the decadence and cruelty at the heart of the Capitol, and many of its residents, a dramatic parade, a training montage of sorts, and a high camp interview with Caesar Flickerman. Along the way, we meet Haymitch’s district partners: well-off town mean girl Maysilee, bookie’s son Wyatt whose father will almost certainly take bets on the odds of his death, and charmingly precocious young Louella. They’re each something different—and something more—than they appear at first glance, and Collins manages to make them all into desperately three-dimensional figures, with hopes and fears and dreams of their own. The story also features appearances from multiple familiar faces from the original trilogy, several of whom play significant roles here as Haymitch’s story intersects in varying degrees with plotlines from several different books.

But it in the arena and its aftermath that Sunrise shines brightest. The Second Quarter Quell Games as horrifying as you might expect, set in a verdant, vibrant Eden-like garden of earthly delights that hides monstrous creatures and deadly poisons. There are grisly ends and horrifying images everywhere—a death by mutant squirrel is particularly gruesome—-and the scale of loss is staggering, as whole districts-worth of tributes are wiped out in what feels like an instant.

But even as Haymitch and his friends organize to try and fight back, the real story of this book is the story that gets told about it. It’s unlikely that Collins could have known how timely a story about government propaganda and the ways that oppressive leaders can erase and alter our understanding of history would be when she wrote this book, but whew, Sunrise’s politics are incredibly on the nose for our current moment. This is a story that counts on the fact that we’re all meant to know how it ends—Peeta and Katniss have watched the official footage of this Games—and uses those assumptions to complicate our understanding of the history of Panem and the rebellion that will catch fire twenty-five years later.

Sunrise on the Reaping is a story about many things: Truth, grit, hope, courage, and resilience. It’s also a story of fear and failure, and a reminder that some truths are immutable and some changes take more time than we’d like them to. It’s a warning about the ways that fear can motivate us to obscure or sublimate truths, and the ways that history can be reshaped and reformed to support agendas we’re unaware of. And it’s a reminder that, in the words of a very different sort of fantasy writer, even the smallest person can change the course of the future.

Sunrise on the Reaping is available now wherever books are sold.

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB

Sunrise on the Reaping Is the Hunger Games Prequel We’ve Been Waiting For