Thoughts for the Serious Reader of Harry Potter
I have explored the structure of the first three Hunger Games novels, the Katniss Everdeen trilogy, and it’s worth a quick review of the approaches I found most helpful before we make the deep dive into Sunrise on the Reaping, the second prequel novel.
First the only thing Collins has said about structure in her few interviews was this:
This is standard three act drama language:
Inserting Mockingjay’s plot points into this structure, we find a neat fit: [Read more…]
My wife and I are just back from five days outside Albany, New York, and I’m excited about writing up my first thoughts on the structures of Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping and the several possible interpretations of Louella/Lou Lou, Haymitch’s “sweetheart.”
Tonight, though, due to unpacking and laundry responsibilities, I want to share the picture above — I was in Orlando’s airport bookstore and noticed they didn’t have any copies of Sunrise; my wife guided me to the front of the store where the above display was clearly for the book-of-the-month — and a story.
We stayed at a hotel near the Albany airport on our way home because the flight was scheduled for very early in the morning. When I checked in, the very pleasant woman at the front desk said, “Oh, you have stayed with us before; welcome back.” I explained that this wasn’t possible because I had not been in Albany except for a brief stop at my wife’s friend’s home outside the city on our honeymoon in 1987. She insisted that she recognized my face and my name.
She was clearly no older than her mid-forties, so I took out the card holder my second daughter gave me when she graduated from college (we went to the same college).
I asked the woman at the desk if she loved to read books, especially better fiction. She allowed that she was an avid reader. I gave her my ‘Dean of Harry Potter Scholars’ card and said, “Among a very small group of very serious readers, I am a niche celebrity.” She looked at the card, smiled, nodded, and asked me if she could keep the card or if I wanted her to take a picture of it and give it back. I said she could keep it, took the magnetic key-cards for the room, and thanked her for her help. [Read more…]
As a adult (not to say aged) Harry Potter fan, its perhaps a little surprising that I have never read any other YA fiction beyond the classics. And by classics I really mean written by dead authors. Since I rediscovered a love of fiction in 2018, my have-been-read list consists of: Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the first four volumes of the Swallows and Amazons series. In terms of children’s and YA literature my to-be-read list (think Emma Woodhouse) is completely empty. No Divergent, no Twilight, no Hunger Games.
Three things have coincided, to make me re-evaluate. I have just finished Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell, a children’s writer who has had some lovely things to say about J. K. Rowling’s work. She has a, very well received, list of children’s books, that look very intriguing. The Hogwarts Professor is agog with the latest instalment of the Hunger Games, and unless I want to be spoiled I cannot read any of the posts (dammit!). Finally some self reflection leads me to believe I am guilty of that fault that I deplore in others: believing myself above such childish things…
So in the spirit of turning turning over a new leaf I have allowed Katniss to take me by the hand and lead me into the series. More tomorrow!
I thought it was a fan creation, but it’s from Lionsgate’s YouTube channel.
The Hollywood Gamesmakers are hard at work, it seems, to prepare us for their re-writing Sunrise, the way they have recast every one of the films to make themselves into the action figure heroes rather than the agents of the regime’s hijacking of everything good and meaningful in Panem.
See ‘Gamesmakers Hijack Story: Capitol Wins Hunger Games Again’ for more on that. Or ‘Hunger Games’ Theme Park in China.
Oh, well! Here’s more Gamesmaker takes on the Sunrise movie…
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.
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