Protest Song:
Review of Sunrise on The Reaping
By Anna Franciosa
“The difference between J. R. R. Tolkien and Suzanne Collins is that Tolkien wrote about what war does to the individual, while Collins writes about what war does to a people” I say to Sam, as we are discussing what they should write their thesis about. They read Sunrise on The Reaping before me. They bought it on release day, and finished it in two days. I borrowed their copy two months later.
I decided to read all of Collins’ other books from The Hunger Games series before getting into the 2025 release. It wasn’t necessary, as Sunrise is a prequel to the original trilogy, and I had already seen all the movies. Yet, I wanted to read all four of the previously existing books in release order instead of chronological order, in hope of better understanding Collins’ creative process and worldbuilding.
When, in the early 2010s, The Hunger Games book trilogy and its subsequent film adaptations forever changed the history of Young Adult literature, I was too caught up in John Green’s world of tragic teenagers to let the door of the dystopian genre open up for me. Reading Collins for the first time in 2025, then, as a socially and politically aware adult with a seemingly adjusted moral compass, turned out to be a radically different experience than that of a pre-teen with a Tumblr account.
My first stab was a miss. Collins’ dystopian series is set in a not too distant future in which North America has turned into the nation of Panem, which is composed of 12 districts of whom the exploitation and labor supports the wealth of the ‘Capitol’. The ‘Hunger Games’ are a yearly occurring televised event in which each district of Panem must send two kids between the ages of 12 and 18 – a boy and a girl, whose names are randomly drawn during the ‘reaping’ ceremony – as ‘tributes’ to the Capitol, where they are made to fight each other to the death in an arena. In the opening chapter of The Hunger Games (2008) we follow sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen on the morning of the reaping for the 74th annual Hunger Games, from the moment she wakes up until her sister’s name is called on the stage, and she volunteers to take her place fighting in the games.
After those initial twenty pages, I couldn’t bring myself to touch the book for weeks. Katniss’ raw description of the state of utter deprivation that characterizes the 12th district of Panem arose in me the same feeling I get every time I go on the internet and read the news. I don’t need to read it in fiction – I thought, at first – I already see it outside my window every morning I open my eyes.
“Reading Collins for the first time in 2025, then, as a socially and politically aware adult with a seemingly adjusted moral compass, turned out to be a radically different experience than that of a pre-teen with a Tumblr account.“
The announcement that Sunrise On The Reaping – the fifth book to be published in the series, but set before the time of the events in the original trilogy, and after those of the first prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020) – would hit the shelves in the Spring of 2025 provided me with the last bit of curiosity I needed to get over myself and continue the series where I had interrupted it. Perhaps – I thought – while deeply depressing, it will help me better understand the times I live in.
Even without having read the books, I had been aware of the inspiration from which Collins drew to write the story for years. The now sixteen-year-old clip in which Collins recounts lying in bed at night channel surfing on television had stumbled across my path many a time. What she relays is flipping between images of reality television shows and footage of the Iraq War, and feeling as though the two are starting to meld in her mind. “[Y]ou see so many images that, do they all begin to have a sameness to them?” she says.
What strikes me most about that clip though, after reading the books, is what Collins says afterwards. She recalls her father being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, and him being gone the entire year that she was six years old. Although Collins’ mother tried her best to protect and shelter her children, the author remembers seeing footage of the war on the TV and being aware that her father was in a “very dangerous, threatening place where people died.” She explains, then, that as a consequence she still feels particularly shaken by any war footage to this day.
(…) I wonder for the people that haven’t had it as a personal experience how that feels. That war, in many ways, we have removed it. People probably feel a lot more attached to the people that are on Survivor or another reality show than they do – unless, again, they know someone specifically – to soldiers that are anonymous to them because we don’t see enough of them, are not following it that carefully, you know, they have weeks and weeks to spend with the people on Survivor.
Collins’s words are poignant and thoughtfully provoking, especially as she chooses Survivor as the reality television show to make an example out of, which centers around the contestants being stranded in an isolated location and having to provide food, fire, and shelter for themselves. Survival – gamified, a televised challenge.
Sunrise On The Reaping opens similarly to The Hunger Games: with sixteen-year-old Haymitch Abernathy waking up the morning of the reaping for the 50th annual Hunger Games. Readers of the original trilogy are already acquainted with this character, as he is one of the most prominent figures aside from the protagonists. When preparing for and fighting in the Hunger Games, the tributes are mentored by the previous victors belonging to their respective district. In The Hunger Games trilogy this is how we meet Haymitch Abernathy: as a grumpy, 40-something-year-old alcoholic who is also the sole living victor of district 12. As he coaches Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark not to get brutally murdered in the arena, we get to know him as a stoic and unmovable man who was clearly scarred by the horrors he has witnessed across the years. Although, with time, his friendship becomes precious to Katniss and Peeta, his character remains reserved and impenetrable. The only moment in which Katniss and Peeta feel as though they’ve caught a glimpse of his past is when, in Catching Fire (2009), they are shown the footage of the 50th Hunger Games, of which Haymitch was crowned victor. Only, though, to have Haymitch tell them that the footage was manipulated by the Capitol, and that what is shown is not a truthful recollection of the events.
Sunrise on The Reaping, then, follows the 50th Hunger Games as narrated by sixteen-year-old Haymitch Abernathy: a truthful recollection, yes, but also one not short of snappy humor and witticism. Haymitch’s narrative tone, in fact, could not be further from that of Katniss Everdeen. While Katniss’s approach is that of a bystanding observer whose sole focus is on survival, Haymitch is driven by rebellious sarcasm. Although he is also sixteen years old and living in the poverty and squalor of District 12, his attitude is characterized by the boldness of teenage boyhood, and the hopelessness of his condition is lightened by the love of his girlfriend, Lenore Dove Baird.
He has a much greater capacity for hope and love and joy. (…) There’s far more color to his expression, more humor. Sadly, at the end of the book you see his concentrated effort to strip all that away, so by the time you reach the trilogy, his language has lost the musicality of his youth. (…) I like to think in his remaining years after the war, he reclaims it. You can hear it coming back in the epilogue.
In Panem, following the tradition of the annual Hunger Games, every twenty-five years falls a Quarter Quell. The rules of a Quarter Quell require that a violent twist is applied to the reaping of the tributes. In Sunrise on The Reaping, the ruling of the 50th Hunger Games is that four tributes be reaped from each district instead of two, thus making the games twice as violent and deadly.
Probably one of my favorite moments in the book in which we see Haymitch publicly make a sassy remark is, in fact, when he is asked about the Quarter Quell in the ‘Hunger Games Night of Interviews’ carried out by Ceasar Flickerman.
Ceasar (…) jumps right in. “So, Haymitch, what do you think of the games having one hundred percent more competitors than usual?” (…) I give a shrug and let a little of that (…) attitude slip in. “I don’t see that it makes much difference. They’ll still be one hundred percent as stupid as usual, so I figure the odds will be roughly the same.”
In an interview released with her publisher, Scholastic, about the 2020 release of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Collins explains that her main interest lays in the exploration of war theory through literature: “I use both [The Underland Chronicles series and The Hunger Games series] to explore elements of just war theory. When I find a related topic that I want to examine, then I look for the place it best fits.” Although the framework for The Hunger Games series and the political structure of the nation of Panem were inspired by the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur – in which Athens had to send fourteen young women and men to Crete to be sacrificed to the Minotaur – for Sunrise on The Reaping, Collins draws from the philosophical work of David Hume. More specifically, his idea of implicit submission. In a statement also released with Scholastic, Collins explains her intention to use this story as a study in the use of propaganda and the power of narrative control. She specifies being inspired by Hume’s theory of “the easiness with which the many are governed by the few,” which also appears in one of the book’s epigraphs. Throughout the book we are, in fact, made aware of the ways in which the Capitol manipulates the footage of the Hunger Games to make themselves appear as a lawful and innocent government, while villainizing its civilians in the eye of the spectator.
Finally having read The Hunger Games books for the first time at age twenty-three feels like catching a train that all your friends have been riding on and off of for years. Sometimes I catch myself talking about them as though they are a hot and new commodity, only for Sam to tell me “I told you so.”
Now, did reading the books actually help me better understand the times I live in? I’m not sure. What it helped with, though, is nursing my hope and strengthening my capacity to deal with them. As a now informed admirer of Collins’ work I find myself deeply inspired by her use of Young Adult fiction, one of the most accessible genres, as an educative medium. I find it, also, to be an incredible display of resilience, the same resilience which is reflected in Haymitch’s character. This resilience is something I truly hope to implement and learn to practice. The knowledge that even though we are going through hard times and the light at the end of the tunnel seems so far away, there will be a day the sun does not rise on the reaping.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
They/them
Anna Franciosa grew up in foggy Northern Italy, among green hills and white mountains. Since 2021, they live in the Netherlands, where they graduated with a BA in Literary Studies at Utrecht University. Being a passionate reader since an early age, their interest now mostly lies in modern classics and contemporary literary fiction. In their free time, they write free verse poetry and pet street cats.
RevUU 