If you had any doubts about the continuing popularity of the Hunger Games franchise, sales of Sunrise on the Reaping should put those concerns to rest. I don’t think that the Panem Trilogy and prequels have any chance of supplanting the Harry Potter novels as the ‘Shared Text’ of the early 21st Century; I cannot think of a fictional work by a living writer, however, that has a greater following and appeal than does Suzanne Collins. Dan Brown may sell a lot of books but his work hasn’t become part and parcel with rebellions around the world:

Sales for Sunrise have been spectacular, not to mince words.

It’s #1 on Amazon.com, the world’s largest bookstore:

No big deal? According to one source, not only is Sunrise #1 today but it is the best selling book on Amazon for the first quarter of 2025 though it has only been in circulation for ten days.

It’s #1 by a large margin, too, at Publisher’s Weekly:

Hungry for More

Suzanne Collins has the #1 book in the country—by a factor of 10—withSunrise on the Reaping, her second Hunger Games prequel. It’s set 40 years after the events of the first prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which has sold 1.8 million copies in hardcover since its 2020 publication. (Two trade paper editions have sold another 860K copies.) Sunrise is a “brutal tale of compassion and rage,” per our starred review, “and a frank examination of propaganda and tragedy.”

The New York Times, per its Harry Potter Panic Policy that created in 2000 a separate Best Seller list for ‘Children and Young Adult Series’ to keep the Boy Wizard from dominating the Fiction category’s four top places, does not list Sunrise anywhere on its several Best Seller lists. Folded into the Hunger Games series, however, it is #1 on the YA Series list, and, though, invisible, I think can safely be assumed to be #1 in all hardcover fiction (Scholastic does not publish an e-Book simultaneously with its Hunger Games new releases.

 

Lionsgate no doubt is pleased and I suspect sales of Sunrise in various formats will continue strong, sustained by the aiding winds of periodic announcements of casting choices for the second prequel’s more important roles. Do you think they’ll put Jennifer Lawrence under a blonde wig to play her 16 year old mother, Astrid? The Gamesmakers have probably already made her an offer, though she’d be better suited to play Willamae Abernathy, Haymitch’s long-suffering Ma.

Even the conjecture stories will boost book sales, which, as of today, don’t need a lift. The legend continues to grow, as does the pressure for at least one more prequel, presumably the Plutarch Heavensbee story.

As I do my the essential re-readings to ‘get’ any Suzanne Collins novels, I find myself thinking again and again about three questions for which we have yet to have answers about Sunrise on the Reaping and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Structure: The only comments the author has made about her story structure was with respect to standard three part sequence of story events (inciting incident, turn, reversal, climax, denouement, etc.).  Her use in four of the five Hunger Games novels of a three-based system (3 Parts with 3-squared chapters in each, the first three comprising a trilogy of books), however, where her story-points occur as a rule in that structure, if it has ring or chiastic elements within it, whether there is a literary alchemy black-white-red sequence as there seemed to be in the Mockingjay novels, all those structural questions remain unanswered. Collins’ obvious structure suggests significant, signature artistry. I’m determined to explore that at last.

Symbolic Depth: The first three novels were at their anagogical depths transcending the surface political allegory the story of the soul’s apotheosis; the soul triptych being Gale as the body, Katniss the soul, and Peeta the Spirit. Read about that in these three ‘Unlocking Mockingjay’ posts:

• ‘Unlocking Mockingjay: The Spiritual Allegory’ On Katniss as a Soul Seeking Perfection and Iconological Reading
• ‘Unlocking Mockingjay: The Literary Alchemy’ On Literary Alchemy and Peeta as Postmodern Christ
• ‘Unlocking Mockingjay: Katniss’ Apotheosis’ On the Alchemical Arena and Katniss’ Perfection in the Inner Sanctuary

Collins’ achievement as a writer in the original Hunger Games trilogy was largely her use of traditional symbolism to create a story in which her readers could share in Katniss’ agonizing transformation and union with Peeta, a cathartic bonanza almost unique in YA literature.

Is there anything like this going on in the prequel novels? It is hard to believe there isn’t given Collins’ accomplishment in the first series, but one has to allow, as Elizabeth Baird Hardy suggested yesterday, that the pressure for a profit-taking and series re-introduction must be enormous.

Series Destination: Are we done? If not, where are we going? Is the prequel series to be a three book set that closes with the Plutarch Heavensbee novel, one that takes from that oligarch’s first meetings with Coriolanus Snow through the Catching Fire Quarter Quell and Mockingjay revolution? Or will it be an indefinite number of books providing more and more back story of the original books? Quo vadis? We’ll be obliged to ask that question.

What questions haunt you? Let me know and Elizabeth Baird Hardy and I will discuss it here!