Publication Day at last!

Whether you purchased your copy of Sunrise at a Midnight Madness party last night or it arrived just after sunrise today, I assume that like me you’ll be listening to or reading the second Hunger Games prequel novel for a day or two.

Our custom here in the week following new releases of long anticipated books is to post Placeholder discussion pieces at which rapid readers can share their first thoughts on specific subjects. I hope to be putting up several of these the first few days before offering my first thoughts on Haymitch’s adventure in the Quarter Quell and Coriolanus Snow’s political rise.

The first of these Placeholders is a natural one — what were your first thoughts on reading Suzanne Collins’ latest? Did it meet your high bar standard and expectations for a Panem novel or were you disappointed? Let us know in the comment boxes below!

All these discussions, of course, will be chock full of spoilers and should be avoided if you don’t want to learn in advance more of the story than the great deal having already been revealed in the previous four Hunger Games pieces. Caveat lector!

Sunrise on the Reaping Placeholder Posts:

1: First Impressions — Delight or Dismay?

2. The Epigraphs from Orwell, Blake, and Hume

3. Collins’ Signature Story Structure

Sunrise on the Reaping opens with four epigraphs: one each for George Orwell and William Blake and two from David Hume.

Collins had said at the cover release that the “implicit submission” idea of Hume’s inspired Sunrise and it is clear from the first two epigraphs that her other comments then about propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative that this will be a driving focus of the second prequel. I was delighted of course by the second epigraph from Hume which spelled out his skeptical thoughts about the probability of the coming day’s sunrise because I had explained in my discussion of the second ‘Sneak Peek’ pre-publication release that Lenore Dove’s thoughts about Haymitch’s surety in, the inevitability of a Reaping on his birthday were straight out of Hume.

That’s our first hit, then, a correspondence between text and epigraph; how many more have you counted?

I noted yesterday that the first three epigraphs of Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes were in direct alignment with Dr Gaul’s teaching about the state of nature and the need of a social contract to restrain humanity’s violent and selfish behaviors, the so-called “three C’s” of “chaos, control, and contract.” Do we see the Orwell, Blake, and Hume epigraphs about propaganda and a skeptical epistemology line up with the Sunrise story elements in this fashion? In another way?

Let us know your thoughts in the comment boxes below! Spoilers, ahoy!

Sunrise on the Reaping Placeholder Posts:

1: First Impressions — Delight or Dismay?

2. The Epigraphs from Orwell, Blake, and Hume

3. Collins’ Signature Story Structure

Let’s talk story structure, shall we?

On the day of publication, we don’t need to get past the Table of Contents for some interesting discussion. Looking at my Audible book TOC, I see that, as I predicted (sort of!) yesterday, Collins has returned to her structural touchstone, namely, a twenty-seven chapter book with epilogue, divided into three equal Parts having nine chapters each. All the Gregor the Overlander books were in this formatting and the first three Hunger Games novels were, too. Only Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, by far the longest novel written by Collins at over 500 pages, broke with this preferred structure; it, too, though, had three Parts with an equal number of chapters in each, ten instead of nine.

Sunrise at only 400 pages is back to Collins’ signature story form. She has given titles to none of the chapters, again per formula, but to each of the novel’s three Parts: The Birthday, the Rascal, and The Poster. If you’ve read the ‘Sneak Peeks,’ you know that Haymitch Abernathy’s birthday is the Fourth of July, Reaping Day in Panem, and that this year’s Quarter Quell reaping will be the beginning of his new life, a change in status as radical as that of a newborn leaving the womb for life in the world of air. Who ‘The Rascal’ is and who or what ‘The Poster’ is, I’m sure will be clear on our first reading.

What I hope we can discuss is Collins’ structure as such, the Dantean three squared chapter numbers in each of the three Parts for three cubed novel length. Is Sunrise on the Reaping a three-act drama a la her first three Hunger Games novels? Is the book a ring composition — with each of its three Parts of nine chapters being a ring within the ring? If the prequel series is to be a three-parter in parallel with the first three books, does the center of prequel Book Two line up with the story beginning in the way that chapter 14 of Catching Fire did with the series opening?

Share your thoughts below!

Sunrise on the Reaping Placeholder Posts:

1: First Impressions — Delight or Dismay?

2. The Epigraphs from Orwell, Blake, and Hume

3. Collins’ Signature Story Structure