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…]