Rihannon Ashby
Rhiannon Ashby tells Impact Magazine that Suzanne Collin’s new novel to The Hunger Games series should be the next on your list. Whether you are a fan of the previous books, the original trilogy or the block-buster films, Sunrise on the Reaping is the book for you. Full of the nostalgia from the previous books, and the energy Haymitch’s character brought to them all, it brought fans back to queuing in line to get their hands on her new book. However, read with caution for spoilers are included.
I can’t pretend I didn’t go into this book ridiculously excited. It wasn’t like the run-up to the release of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, where there was a question around what the book itself would be: a redemption, or an explanation? I anticipated this book – I wanted to learn about Haymitch Abernathy. What secrets would he reveal to us? And, since Catching Fire essentially reveals this book’s exact plot, what was the book going to be about? What was its purpose?
WHILE IT CLEARLY SETS UP THE CHARACTER AND IS A POLITICAL COMMENTARY IN ITSELF, IT ALSO FORMS THE BACKBONE OF THE EMOTIONAL CORE OF THE BOOK.
This book is an absolute masterclass in set-up and pay-off. Every scene accomplishes at least three different purposes – whether that be a character beat, an emotional or plot beat, or withering political commentary. Almost everything Haymitch does in the opening sequence (the cistern, the gumdrops), every interaction he has (‘Can you imagine [the sun] rising on a world without the reaping?’) becomes integral to the denouement.
Most of this also functions as a misdirect – like the cistern. We know Haymitch choosing not to re-fill it is a set-up because we know he will be reaped and will never get the chance to do so. What we don’t know is that the cistern he never filled will mean that there is no water to put out his burning house. We’ve forgotten about the cistern by that point, so when it happens, it hits like a brick for us just as much as it does for Haymitch. The same is true of the gumdrops. But Haymitch and Lenore’s conversation in the Meadow serves a different purpose. While it clearly sets up the character and is a political commentary in itself, it also forms the backbone of the emotional core of the book. Trauma is not overcome or dismissed by hope – but hope is indomitable. It’s Haymitch’s promise to Lenore, introduced in that scene right at the start of the book, that keeps his heart and shapes the narrative not just of Sunrise on the Reaping, but of the entire following trilogy. 
That’s the other thing about this book – it doesn’t confine its relevance to itself. There is so much about the narrative and the characters that throw hooks into its predecessors and reel them in, entirely re-framing them. Lenore’s significance to the Covey, Snow’s utter assassination of his own goodness, Haymitch’s nickname for Katniss, the Mockingjay pin, and Katniss’s father being Haymitch’s best friend, so he cannot help but find it unacceptable when he wakes to discover it is her climbing onto the Tribute train. How Haymitch forms the bridge between Snow and Katniss even down to Lenore’s flint striker, the songbird and the snake. How it’s Katniss, carrying the implicit rebellion of Lucy Gray in her Mockingjay wings, and mirroring Haymitch’s fiery resistance, who destabilises Snow’s unstitchable evil. Everything connects, everything enriches and redefines everything that comes before and after, and I think this is what becomes the purpose of Sunrise on the Reaping. It’s not over until the Mockingjay sings.
IF THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES WAS ABOUT HOW OUR CHOICES DEFINE WHO WE ARE, SUNRISE ON THE REAPING IS ABOUT THE THINGS LOSS AND TRAUMA DO TO A PERSON.
A similar thing happens with the characters, especially the recurring ones. They are all of them re-framed. Everything the Haymitch of the original trilogy does we discover to be out of pain and love. There’s something to be said for the over-redemption of some characters, though. Arguably Effie Trinket and Plutarch Heavensbee lose some of their ambiguity in the original trilogy because their good so undeniably wins through in Sunrise on the Reaping. It’s not awful, though, because Plutarch’s calculated exploitation of everyone for his own benefit is still in spite of his support of freedom, and Effie’s Capitol-raised corruption is still her last word. But for most characters, the book simply reminds us to be kind about how broken they all are. If The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was about how our choices define who we are, Sunrise on the Reaping is about the things loss and trauma do to a person. And it’s handled with such softness, such understanding, that Haymitch’s tentative happy ending does not feel like a fairy-story cop-out. It does not diminish his suffering, or erase all the pain and cruelty he will never escape.
The only criticism I do have is that Sunrise on the Reaping doesn’t differ too much in its social commentary from The Hunger Games. Don’t get me wrong, it still has a lot to say. The manipulation of the coverage of Haymitch’s Games writes back to the media manipulation of events (especially in America), and the increased violence of the deaths in this book seems to hold a mirror to the fandom’s fascination with the Games themselves. We are reminded of our complicity, our own ‘implicit submission’, our reflection of the Capitol’s exploitation of violence for entertainment.
IT’S ABOUT DESPAIR, NOT HOPE. AND YET HOPE PERMEATES THE NOVEL. PLUTARCH’S ‘WE NEED SOMEONE EXACTLY LIKE YOU’ IS AN OUT-THRUST ARM OF HOPE BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT KATNISS WILL BECOME.
All in all, Sunrise on the Reaping is a book that lands all its blows with utter precision; a book full of devastation and despair that somehow manages to infuse itself with goodness. It’s not a story of hope and fire and the ultimate burning of evil like The Hunger Games trilogy, though these things are central. It’s not a story about how the choices we make shape our descent into villainy, how even the monster of Panem once almost stepped into humanity, like The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. It’s a story about making choices that seem right at the time, sacrificing and losing things and fighting anyway, only for everything to come crashing down. It’s about despair, not hope. And yet hope permeates the novel. Plutarch’s ‘We need someone exactly like you’ is an out-thrust arm of hope because that is what Katniss will become. Hope is woven into Haymitch’s despair because we know what is to come. In a way, what Sunrise on the Reaping reveals of him is hope itself.
Goodness matters, even in Haymitch’s failed selflessness. Love endures in Haymitch’s promise to Lenore. It is there in the way Haymitch, as the middle point between Coriolanus and Katniss, re-frames everything and welds it back into hope.
Rhiannon Ashby
Featured image courtesy of Ashkan Ala via Unsplash. Permission to use granted to Impact. No changes were made to this image.
In-article images courtesy of Jon Tyson via Unsplash. No changes were made to these images.
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