Hogwarts Professor

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.

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