a depressing Hunger Games prequel with interesting connections

 

Sunrise on the Reaping is the second prequel of the Hunger Games series. It’s from Haymitch Abernathy’s (Katniss from the main series’ mentor’s) perspective. 

If you don’t know the Hunger Games, it’s about this dystopian future in the nation Panem, where there are districts that serve the Capitol and President Snow as punishment for their rebellion in the past. And once a year there is the hunger games where a boy and a girl aged 12-18 from each of the 12 districts must fight to the death in an arena, leaving one winner–though according to Haymitch, there are survivors, but no winners. 

So this book is about the 50th hunger games (the main series is during the 74th-75th). Every 25 years there is a Quarter Quell, where there’s some sort of twist, and this year twice as many kids have to enter the arena. And Haymitch is one of them. He is separated from his girlfriend Lenore Dove and must go fight.

This book was extremely depressing. Kind of a SPOILER but it seems like Suzanne Collins was thinking, I can’t kill off the main character but why not kill everyone else?

But other than that I thought it was pretty good, especially all the connections to the main series and the first prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (which according to me was a slow paced book that was not very interesting until the ending, and I liked Sunrise on the Reaping a lot more). 

One of the connections is how Katniss’s parents are Haymitch’s age and it was interesting to see them then, because in the main series it tells us that her dad, Burdock, died in a mining accident and her mom was always distant, affected by Burdock’s death and never really there for her family. But in Sunrise on the Reaping we get to meet both of them when they are young. 

There are a few other characters that are in the other books, like Beetee, who is a previous victor of the hunger games and whose 12 year old son Ampert gets sent in the arena as punishment for Beetee trying to mess up the capitol’s communication system. Beetee is also forced to mentor Ampert, who will go into the arena where he is expected to die, which helps explain Beetee’s joining the fight against the capitol in the main series.

Also, Lenore Dove, Haymitch’s girlfriend, is descended from the Covey, a group of performers that Lucy Gray Baird, one of the main characters from The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, was a part of. 

I think this book also helped me understand President Snow a little better too. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is about him and basically how he went bad, but most of the time he isn’t that bad. Also in the main series he didn’t seem that bad either, besides the fact that he forced kids to fight to the death in an arena. You would think that would make him seem pretty evil, but when he talks to Katniss he seems okay and I kept forgetting that the reason the capitol is evil is mostly because he is evil and he is in charge, if that makes any sense. But while reading Sunrise on the Reaping suddenly I thought—this guy is insane he’s terrible evil awful. Or something like that.

But anyway, I also liked Haymitch as a narrator/character. He's pretty brave and kind. Until the depressing part at least. But you can’t blame him for changing after everything he went through.

I would definitely recommend Sunrise on the Reaping (at least if you don’t mind sad endings too much) after reading the main series and maybe The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, but it’s not that necessary to read it to understand this book. I thought it was interesting to see Haymitch’s perspective and some of the other characters from the other books.

-Janny