Photo by Todd Plitt, Scholastic
With a week to go until the publication of the second Hunger Games series prequel, let’s take a look at the five things we have been told about Sunrise on the Reaping.
(1) The Plot — and the Ending?
From the Sunrise Amazon page:
When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?
As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.
Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.
When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.
For readers of the Hunger Games original series, this is not much of tease. We’ve read about the Quarter Quell that Haymitch Abernathy won in Chasing Fire, chapter 14, in which Peeta and Katniss watch the edited tape of how he survived. All Ms Collins’ books are twenty-seven chapters long, which makes chapter 14 of Chasing Fire the central or pivotal chapter of that book and of the entire series. In the coming week we’ll be taking a deep dive into it, as you’d expect.
But we know how Haymitch’s Hunger Games experience ends or at least how the Capitol edited the story. That’s a first for anything Collins has written.
(2) We Have the First Two Pages of the Story
Scholastic released a teaser as a kind of ‘book trailer’ and it has quite a bit of information we didn’t have from Haymitch, who said relatively little about his Games in the Katniss and Peeta Saga. If you haven’t read it, you can read it at one of the several venues that claim to have it exclusively. Here’s the Barnes & Noble version.
I hope to give this excerpt a close reading in the next few days with Elizabeth Baird-Hardy but the top three notes of interest are that Haymitch is the narrator of the opening chapter (and I hope the rest of the book), it is his 16th birthday and as a gift to Abernathy fans we get to meet his younger brother and mother as well as a brief look at their subsistence existence, and, last but not least, it is a Reaping Day times Two because of the Quarter Quell and our hero wants to spend some time with his true love, Lenore Dove. [Read more…]
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