Sunrise on the Reaping Placeholder 3: Three Novel Parts of Nine Chapters Each

March 18, 2025 by 2 Comments

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

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‘Sunrise on the Reaping:’ Everything We Know from the Hunger Games Novels

March 17, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Sunrise on the Reaping is Published Tomorrow! Woot!

Having reviewed the first and second ‘Sneak Peeks’ that Scholastic released to prime the sales pump in the run-up to tomorrow’s book release, today let’s roll through the first four Hunger Games novels to see what they have to say about Haymitch Abernathy’s Quarter Quell experience and about the life of Coriolanus Snow, the presumed split focus of Sunrise. I’m looking at my notes that I made last week during a rapid re-read of the series thus far — and I’m wondering if an author has ever published a novel whose major plot points are as well known as those in Sunrise on the Reaping.

Book by book then! I’ll close with Sunrise predictions based on what we know — and how the second prequel may set up the third.

The Hunger Games

  • Madge Undersee and her Aunt Donner’s Mockingjay pin

Chapter 3 of the first Hunger Games novel is crowded with people rushing to say goodbye to Katniss at the Justice Building before her train leaves for the Capitol and she goes to her almost certain death. She meets briefly with her mother and Prim, Peeta’s father the baker, Madge Undersee, and Gale. All those conversations are telling in their way but the most mysterious and telling encounter is her brief meeting with the young friend Katniss doesn’t really think of as a friend, the Mayor’s daughter, Madge.

Madge gives her the Mockingjay pin to wear as her District 12 token in the arena, makes her promise to wear it, and kisses her on the cheek. Katniss, after her conversation with Gale, reflects on the Mockingjay, its history as part Capitol Muttation part breeding miracle, and her memories of her father singing to these avian recorders.  She concludes: “Still, there’s something comforting about the little bird. It’s like having a piece of my father with me, protecting me. I fasten the pin onto my shirt, and with the dark green fabric, I can almost imagine the mockingjay flying through the trees” (43-44).

There’s a lot to unpack there, especially when tied to the “tongues of fire” aside about Katniss’s interview dress, but for now just note how early this pin is introduced in the story, a pin whose symbolism becomes the token not only of District 12 but of the entire rebellion against the Capitol, and that, as we eventually learn, it has a strong connection with Haymitch’s time in the arena. Maysilee Donner, one of his fellow District 12 tributes, was the original owner of the mockingjay pin (Catching Fire, chapter 7), and we have to wonder if Haymitch remembers this. Expect it to come up in Sunrise on the Reaping.

  • Template of Sunrise? Echoes of opening in Sneak Peeks

As noted in yesterday’s post here and the one the day before, both of the Scholastic ‘Sneak Peeks’ were heavy in resonances with the first Hunger Games novel: the wake-up for an early morning trip to the woods on Reaping Day, a food gift from family, a note that Haymitch found the plums in the forest (he’s a forager?), the slightly off relationship with the widow-mother, the beloved younger sibling, the borderline clandestine meeting with a dear friend of the opposite sex and conversation on the edge of argument about the Reaping, Buttercup the cat and Lenore’s geese not being friends of our heroine and hero.

That’s a bunch of parallels, no? I think we’re looking at a trip to the Capitol and to the arena for Haymitch that will look a lot like Katniss’s and that the differences will be markers of what Haymitch wants to be sure to teach the Boy with the Bread and the Girl on Fire twenty-four years later.

  • Wolf Muttations

Perhaps the most frightening moment in the arena comes at the end of chapter 24 and most of 25 when what seem to be a cross between wolves and super-soldiers attack Cato, Katniss, and Peeta. We meet in Mockingjay an even more deadly variant — add lizards! — of this Capitol breeding project in that city’s sewers and tunnels, but their first appearance in the series and the haunting suggestion that the Gamesmakers have inlaid the eyes and characters of the dead tributes into their genetic stew that we are to meet again and again in the series. [Read more…]

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‘Sunrise on the Reaping’ Second Excerpt A Reading by Suzanne Collins: Lenore Dove, Haymitch, and Humean Logic

March 16, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Two Days Until Publication of Sunrise on the Reaping! The Day After Tomorrow!

Tonight, as promised, I want to take a closer look at the second “Sneak Peek” preview excerpt from Sunrise, this one read by Suzanne Collins. Tomorrow I pledge to write up my notes about what we know about the plot of the fifth Hunger Games novels based on the revelations in the first four with citations of those passages. Looking at these notes, I have to wonder if any book published has ever had so much of its plot already in the public record before its publication. We already have much more in hand than either or both of the pre-pub “Sneak Peeks” have shared.

As with yesterday’s review of the opening pages of Sunrise, I will provide the transcript (one posted by UnHolySir) passage and then my notes behind bullet points.

A few of the geese hiss to announce my arrival. Lenore Dove’s was the first face they saw when they hatched, and they don’t love anyone but her. But since I’ve got corn, they’ll tolerate me today. I toss it a ways away to call off her bodyguards and lean in to kiss her. Then I kiss her again and again, and she kisses me right back.

  • We have another echo here of the Hunger Games opening in which Katniss shares her Buttercup the cat relationship history.
  • To anticipate tomorrow’s post, Lenore Dove’s goose-keeping and the centrality of Haymitch’s love for her with respect to how he lives the rest of his life is something we know about from one of the last paragraphs in Mockingjay: “We learn to keep busy again. Peeta bakes. I hunt. Haymitch drinks until the liquor runs out, and then raises geese until the next train arrives. Fortunately, the geese can take pretty good care of themselves” (387).
  • We’ll be talking about the symbolism of geese and their use in mythology and literature as it plays out in Sunrise.

“Happy birthday,” she says when we come up for air. “Didn’t expect to see you until after.”

She means the reaping, but I don’t want to talk about it.

“Hattie let me go early,” I tell her. “Gave me this too. A present for my big day.”

I pull out the bottle. [Read more…]

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‘Sunrise on the Reaping’ First Excerpt: Haymitch, Sid, Ma, and Lenore Dove

March 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Three Days Until Publication of Sunrise on the Reaping!

Scholastic has released two short excerpts from the opening chapter of Sunrise, the second one being in the form of a reading by the author, Suzanne Collins.

Let’s take a paragraph by paragraph look at the first excerpt from the fifth Hunger Games novel and the second prequel. We’ll have the full text on Tuesday the 18th but the two teasers we’ve been given — tomorrow I’ll go through the excerpt read by Collins — are an opportunity to begin thinking about the new book in the context of the four other Hunger Games codices before we’re overwhelmed by the undertow of the whole story.

This excerpt appeared last week at BarnesAndNoble.com. My notes are after the bullet point markers.

Happy birthday, Haymitch!”

The upside of being born on reaping day is that you can sleep late on your birthday. It’s pretty much downhill from there. A day off school hardly compensates for the terror of the name drawing. Even if you survive that, nobody feels like having cake after watching two kids being hauled off to the Capitol for slaughter. I roll over and pull the sheet over my head.

  • Sunrise opens on a Reaping Day in District 12 with our hero, Haymitch Abernathy, struggling to wake up. It is almost exactly the opening scene of Hunger Games in which Katniss is grumpy at her rising, also in a hurry to get somewhere on the morning of a Reaping Day.
  • We were told in Ballads of Songbirds and Snakes (p 13) that Reaping Day is a fixed calendar day, namely, the 4th of July. There’s some irony here because American Independence Day has morphed into Panem District Subjection Day. It also means that our man Haymitch, being born on the 4th of July just as the United States conventionally considers that day its Birthday and national holiday, the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, is marked by Collins as an archetypal American, for better or worse.
  • That or he’s Panem’s Ron Kovic, the Marine Corps Vietnam veteran who becomes an anti-war activist, whose autobiography is titled Born on the Fourth of July. Haymitch is a Quarter Quell Victor who becomes a driving force in the Mockingjay revolution against the Capitol.

“Happy birthday!” My ten-year-old brother, Sid, gives my shoulder a shake. “You said be your rooster. You said you wanted to get to the woods at daylight.”

  • Prim does not wake Katniss up in the Hunger Games opening; she is on her way to the woods at dawn, however. Prim like Sid, though, is the beloved younger sibling that we meet in the first paragraphs.
  • Elizabeth Baird-Hardy pointed out in her discussion of the preview-excerpt that the first bird reference is in the first one hundred words of the novel. I’ll try to track the birds as they pop up.

It’s true. I’m hoping to finish my work before the ceremony so I can devote the afternoon to the two things I love best — wasting time and being with my girl, Lenore Dove. My ma makes indulging in either of these a challenge, since she regularly announces that no job is too hard or dirty or tricky for me, and even the poorest people can scrape up a few pennies to dump their misery on somebody else. But given the dual occasions of the day, I think she’ll allow for a bit of freedom as long as my work is done. It’s the Gamemakers who might ruin my plans.

  • Lenore Dove is our second bird and that name is rich. There’s a  ballad called ‘Lenore’ that I expect Elizabeth Baird-Hardy will be telling us about soon and the more famous Edgar Allen Poe poem of the same name. As with Lucy Gray Baird in Ballads, whose given names are the title of a poem by Wordsworth, I think ‘Lenore Dove’s life and early tragic death will track with Poe’s ‘Lenore.’
  • Ballad readers will note that Haymitch’s name for his mother is “Ma,” the affectionate name Sejanus Plinth calls his fish-out-of-water mom and which Coriolanus Snow thinks is a real tag of the Plinth’s not being proper Capitol, rich as they are. It was Sejanus’ last word as he died on the gallows and I suspect if Snow hears Haymitch use this endearment he will twitch.
  • The “dual occasion” is almost certainly the coincidence of his birthday and the Reaping Day, though, as it happens every year, I’m not sure why Ma would consider it a day of special allowance. Because it’s a Quarter Quell and her boy’s twice as likely to be chosen?
  • Collins seems to be in a hurry here to let her readers know that the Abernathys are a poor working family; there are tints here of melodrama.

[Read more…]

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Symbols and Sunrise on the Reaping: A Few District 12 Predictions from the Previews

March 14, 2025 by Leave a Comment

We are just a few days away from the release of the second Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping. As we anticipate the story of the fiftieth Quarter Quell, forty years after The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and twenty-four years before The Hunger Games, it’s a safe bet that Suzanne Collins will once again use symbol and story woven together as powerfully as the bird, serpent, and crown that adorn the cover of this new volume. We now have a short print preview and an interview sneak preview that have given us a few hints, so join me after the jump for some predictions, based on those short sneak peeks and on some of the powerful themes and symbols we have already seen at work in the world of Panem.

[Read more…]

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