Suzanne Collins's Sunrise on the Reaping
A Book Review
Five seconds after I met Haymitch Abernathy I hated the guy. I mean that seriously. The second I saw him I know him for what he was; a raging alcoholic who really didn’t care about anybody. His attitude toward Katniss and Peeta in The Hunger Games was abhorrent. He was going to let two kids get slaughtered while doing nothing to change their fates and all that mattered to him was getting liquored up to forget about it. I’ve been around alcoholics. I know the symptoms. I was right. I knew it.
Okay, so I was wrong. By the end of the movie (and I saw the first movie before I read any of the books) he had cleaned himself up enough to help Katniss and Peeta get through their Games. He got what was needed when it was needed and helped get the job done, to say nothing about his role in the next two books. Haymitch, it turns out, was a kinda okay-ish guy. Probably.
Of course, at no point did I stop to wonder what had happened to him that made him want to drink that much. That’s not a Jimbo thing. Anyone who knows me knows that empathy isn’t my strong suit. It never has been. I always just figured he was that guy and let it go at that. I mean, I knew he had been through the Games himself and in a particularly hard year. I just never thought about what that meant.
So, when I picked up Suzanne Collins’s Sunrise on the Reaping I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I wasn’t going to tolerate any whining from Haymitch. I didn’t have time for that. I had less than zero interest in hearing that guy make excuses. If any of that happened the book was going up against the wall.
SPOILER ALERT: I didn’t throw the book against the wall. This is doubly good because I got the Kindle edition and I’m pretty sure that hitting the wall at a high velocity would have been a bad thing for my phone. Granted, I’d like to get a new phone but well…
Yeah. Bad.
Anyway…
Sunrise on the Reaping is Suzanne Collins at her best. I will grant you that it the book is written in first person present tense and that some of you don’t like that. It bothered me for about the first hundred pages of the first book but, having seen the movie I got over that. The fact remains that Collins is one of the best selling authors of probably the last seventeen or eighteen years and there is a reason for that: Collins can write.
She managed to make me a fan of Haymitch. Honestly, I thought I’d be more likely to see rain rising from the ground and flying off into the sky to rejoin the cloud they had originally fallen from. I mean, I had gotten over my initial outright disgust with the dude but that was always provisional. I was ready to go off on the guy and leave him sitting on the side of the road waist deep in a snowbank wearing only his underwear at a moments notice. Just take one toe off the line, buddy. But a funny thing happened on my way to the Arena: My character arced. I get Haymitch now.
In a lot of ways, Haymitch’s victory was more believable than Katniss’s. Haymitch comes across as a scared kid a lot more often than Katniss did. Don’t get me wrong. A lot of what Haymitch did was incredibly brave, but Haymitch almost seems resigned to not making it home in parts where Katniss never did, or at least not after she got on the train. Haymitch feels real.
And the action feels right, too. Not only can Collins write an awesome fight scene, she simulates the fog of war better than pretty much any writer I’ve read. Seriously. Lots of authors can write an exciting fight. I’ve never read anyone who can make my body shake and my eyes pop open like Collins when a cannon goes off (signifying the death of a Tribute) and not knowing why, or even who.
What just happened? Is this a good thing for our main character or a bad thing? What is going to come out of the bush? Is it horrifying? What if it’s nothing? Are the games makers going to force everyone together for the finale or will they give it another day or two? Where is everybody and how big is this arena anyway? Not only are these similar to questions that real life military officers would have to ask themselves, but it’s the not knowing itself that makes things work so well. Of course, the present tense style prose helps here, but I’m not allowed to mention that. Someone’s head might explode.
Of course, Haymitch isn’t the only Tribute in the arena. It’s the Second Quarter Quell and instead of twenty-three competitors, Haymitch has to contend with forty-seven others. Some of them are enemies. Some are friends or allies. All of them seem to be doing their best to act in their own best interests. The Hunger Games are war except worse. In war, you fight to get yourself and your buddies home. In the Games you fight to get yourself home knowing that you may have to kill your buddies along the way. Somehow, some way, he manages to sort out the good from the bad from the ugly and handle his business.
And that’s not a spoiler. I’ve known since 2012 that Haymitch won his games and that’s why he was Katniss and Peeta’s mentor. I was late to the party. Others have known since 2008 and, while I’m not sure exactly where the line is, seventeen years is long enough ago that it no longer counts as a spoiler. The end of the Games was kind of horrifying though, and not at all how I pictured it even though I knew how it was going to happen in theory. The government of Panem has apparently taken lessons from the British government as portrayed in 1984.
Oddly enough though, it was the epilogue that started a conversation between myself and my daughter. Granted, she texted me to talk about things and I had to call her back two days later after I finished it, but that’s life in the big city. I’m not always a big fan of prologues or epilogues but you definitely want to read the epilogue of this Sunrise on the Reaping. It’s the payoff that counts, and I got a good one here.
Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Necklaces
Sunrise on the Reaping
Suzanne Collins
Scholastic, 2025
Sunrise on the Reaping is available for purchase at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.
Sunrise on the Reaping