Review: "Sunrise on the Reaping" by Suzanne Collins

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
Published March 2025 via Scholastic Press
★★★★

Back a quarter century before the first Hunger Games book, and here we go: Haymitch's story. I reread the original trilogy, plus read the first prequel for the first time, in advance of Sunrise on the Reaping's release, so the books were much fresher in my mind than they would have been otherwise. (Make no mistake: I managed to forget a lot of crucial details anyway. But it helped.)

In the original trilogy, Haymitch is something of a bad-tempered alcoholic. It's so obvious that he gave up years ago—in two and a half decades of mentoring tributes in the Hunger Games, none of those tributes has ever come home. Even if he'd started out fresh and eager (as opposed to, say, fresh off the trauma of being subjected to the Hunger Games himself), mentoring child after child to their death, year after year, would be enough to drive anyone to the bottle.

But this is not that story: this is Haymitch as a sixteen-year-old, one whose odds put him in the arena. And you know...I'm mostly not going to talk about what happens in that arena, because you can read the book (or probably one of many extensive breakdowns that has already been written) to find out what happens there. What interests me more are the choices Collins must have had to make here. We see some of Haymitch's story already in the original trilogy, so Collins had to make sure that whatever was in this book was—one way or another—consistent with those nuggets. She's also made a concerted effort to bring in as many recurring characters as possible: Snow, of course, and Effie Trinket, and other people Katniss knows. This is Haymitch's backstory, but it's also a backstory for a number of other recurring characters. (Though I'm not as much a fan of the Covey story—felt a bit too similar to that in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.) It leaves me wondering how long Collins had these backstories in mind, and how much she must have had to figure out later down the line.

The other thing this made me realize: Haymitch is so young. He's 16 at these 50th Hunger Games; by the time Katniss's Games roll around (the 74th), he'd be only 40. A reminder of how much trauma and hard lives can age a person, I guess. (Also—it strikes me that statistically speaking, there's a good chance that at some point there would have been a teenage parent or two drawn for the Hunger Games. I can see why Collins wouldn't want to add that to the mix, if she even considered it, but another reminder of how many people are affected by war. Well, and also that even the Hunger Games books have their moments of sanitizing for a teenaged audience.)

Overall, an unsurprisingly wildly depressing book but a satisfying one.