Sunrise on the Reaping

My love for The Hunger Games battled with my general dislike for prequels when I requested the newest Suzanne Collins novel Sunrise on the Reaping.

Spoiler alert! This post is full of spoilers for most if not all of the Hunger Games books! 

First, I worried that a prequel wouldn’t have much to add to the story of Haymitch’s games when Katniss and Peeta already watched Haymitch’s games, and we know how it will go.  We know there were double the tributes in that Quarter Qull and we know Haymitch won by using the edges of the arena as a weapon.  And of course, we readers already know Haymitch survived, but it’s not really a spoiler to know that the protagonist will survive the novel. I was worried there wouldn’t be any drama or much of a story.

Since the Capital has edited the footage, though, what Katniss saw isn’t the full story. The beginning of Sunrise on the Reaping shows Haymitch getting selected for the reaping, and that’s not been told honestly by the Capital recap either. It’s interesting that Haymitch wasn’t really drawn in the second Quarter Quell, but ended up going, and then his name was drawn in the third one but Peeta jumped in instead.  This highlighted the random nature of living and dying in the Districts, as well as the absolute control of the Capital.

Haymitch’s real story does include his interview line that he doesn’t care if there are double the number of tributes, since they’re still all just as stupid, but the story told by the Capitol has been edited and revised. There are more tributes from District 12, which shows readers more of the families and friendships there. Seeing young Haymitch with his caring mother and his schoolfriends,, or just hurrying through his part-time job to go see his girlfriend, makes such a terrible contrast to how he ends up.

One of the District 12 tributes is killed in an accident before the games officially start, but this is before the constant live-feeds, so there’s the ability to edit what happens before the viewers see. The way Capital edits the story works well for the plot here, and for the future that we readers know is coming — this control leads to the world in which Katniss grows up, with mandatory viewing and 24/7 games feeds. Plus, it lets the Capitol replace the dead Luella with a disturbing body double — how did they just happen to have a girl who looks like Luella? How many other children are they holding? Was there another plot against the Capitol in her original district?

One theme of The Hunger Games trilogy is about the responsibility of children. First, there’s the overall message of the District losing their young people to the Capital. Pretty early on, Katniss has the responsibility of kids, taking care of her own little sister after their father’s death and mother’s depression. She and Gale think they could escape District 12 and survive in the woods, but not supporting “so many kids,” since their younger siblings and widowed mothers rely on them to bring home food.

In Haymitch’s games, we see Beetee and his son Ampert. Ampert’s been reaped as a tribute to punish Beetee, a former victor, for his role in a plot against the Capitol. Like Mags, Beetee is a former victor who doesn’t see his own life as so important. He was fine with his own probable death as a means to his anti-Capitol goals. So instead, Ampert will die in the arena. Interestingly, Ampert knows his father’s rebellion has cost his own life, and he doesn’t seem mad at Beetee. In this way, Ampert is an even darker sacrifice than the rest of the tributes, because he’s dying for the Capitol’s entertainment and specifically for his father’s punishment.  Young Ampert continues the family tradition of organizing against the Capitol, even though he has no real chance of survival, maybe one of the other Newcomers might. I wish we’d gotten more of Beetee — could there be another pre-prequel about him?

I liked seeing more of Haymitch’s backstory, and I liked the hints about Beetee’s life, but it felt slightly forced to have Mags, Wiress, Beetee, and Effie all at Haymitch’s games.  It was clear in Catching Fire that Mags, Wiress, and Beetee had their own trauma (This isn’t a deep literary insight. They’d each survived a murder tournament by the time we met them at the Third Quarter Quell.) and I would have enjoyed getting to see more of one of their backstories. Maybe two.  I think this is part of my general dislike of prequels — any foreshadowing feels forced because we all know how the story ends up.  I felt the same way about seeing Katniss’ parents as teenagers and discovering Haymitch’s side job helping distill booze.

The second reason I was a little anxious about reading Sunrise on the Reaping is that I didn’t really Songbirds and Snakes as much as others seemed to love it. Overall, I enjoyed seeing how the Capital could come to not only accept the annual murder games but to see them as a entertainment. It was interesting to see how Snow brought the revenge games into the murder spectacle that Katniss just takes for granted in the beginning of The Hunger Games, and that really added to the overall world development.  The Games began as revenge for the war, and then Snow and his classmates added more entertainment, with sponsors and mentors and more drama, and by the time Katniss is born, the Games are an annual spectacle in the Capitol with mandatory viewing in the Districts.  I read a lot of dystopian scifi, and sometimes you just have to roll with the existence of the torment nexus or whatever to get to the storyline. Here, I could really see how the world came to be.

It was interesting to see the shift from Covey as local entertainers in District 12, to Katniss’ dad singing, to Katniss’ complete disregard for anything musical because singing wasn’t useful for her survival. This represented a larger shift of repression in the districts, and added a strong sense of time to the world of Panem.

But I didn’t love Lucy Gray (or the romance) in Songbirds and Snakes. I really don’t enjoy the kind of special protagonist to whom the regular rules don’t apply, and Lucy Grey was a Magical Special Girl, who doesn’t follow rules and who’s full of secrets, music and whimsy.  There are already so many very special protagonists living in dystopias that somehow don’t affect them, so I was also disappointed by such a skilled and talented, pretty and resourceful, musical and rebellious everything-heroine, especially because in The Hunger Games, Katniss avoided the common dystopian-novel characteristics of a Magical Special Girl Protagonist. Katniss didn’t have any special powers, she wasn’t the chosen one or from a special family. Sure, I expected the protagonist to live through the games, but I also expected the normal rules of living in District 12 to apply to her. 

It’s not explicitly spelled out, because Haymitch doesn’t have access to all the information that Hunger Games readers have, but there’s a strong hint that Haymitch’s girlfriend, Lenora Dove, is Lucy Grey and Coriolanus Snow’s daughter. This connects to the overall theme of protecting children, if Lucy Gray disappeared and escaped from Snow to protect her baby. It also means that Snow killed his own daughter. His punishment for Haymitch was actually his punishment to himself and to the whole Snow family line, not that he knows that.

Overall, I enjoyed Sunrise on the Reaping for the way the novel adds so much to Haymitch’s character, and the world of Panem. It did really well for a prequel, because it still managed to have tension, despite readers all knowing who the survivor would be. But it’s definitely not on the level with The Hunger Games.