Suzanne Collins Gets Me Every Time

Spotlight on Sunrise on the Reaping

I am a longtime fan of Suzanne Collins. One of my earliest posts on this blog was aimed toward fans of The Hunger Games trilogy. I have not watched any of the films because I wanted to preserve my images of the universe created by Collins. I also loved the author’s middle-grade series The Underland Chronicles. If you haven’t already, you should definitely check out that five-book series, which Collins created as an urban rethinking of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Though made for a younger audience than Hunger Games, the world is no less immersive and complex. She is an amazingly adept author, great at world building, and phenomenal and character and motivation.

This week I read — no, consumed Sunrise on the Reaping (2025), Collins’s latest prequel in the Hunger Games universe. I liked the other prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which tells the origin story of President Snow, antagonist of the trilogy, but I really loved Sunrise on the Reaping. I got my kid to read it (it wasn’t hard) so that I would have someone to discuss it with. : )

[Some spoilers for the original trilogy included; no spoilers for Sunrise.]

Sunrise tells the story of Haymitch Abernathy’s time as a tribute in the 50th Hunger Games, when each district had to send twice as many children to be slaughtered. In the trilogy, Haymitch acts as mentor for Katniss and Peeta, and we mostly know him as a drunk and curmudgeon. Getting to see Haymitch before his games shows a softer side of his personality, making his transformation even more crushing. Collins skillfully shows Haymitch’s motivation and how the series of events leads him to take actions he wouldn’t have imagined.

Any reader coming to this book after the trilogy knows very well what happens in the Games — everybody is going to die! That makes the tension even greater. I was flipping pages like crazy to see what would happen to the people Collins got me to care about (darn her!), knowing they couldn’t survive.

A delight of Sunrise was the cameos and Easter eggs included. We get to see a bunch of the characters who return for the 75th Games (when only former victors are eligible to compete in the Games) and some of the symbols and motifs are alive and well here. Back in District 12 we also get to meet Katniss’s father as a teenager.

Highest recommendation for this amazing book. My request for Collins?: Please start a new series! She is so amazing at world building, I would love to see what else she can do. I will already sign up to be immersed in that new world.