‘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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‘Sunrise on the Reaping’ Inspired by Hume’s “Implicit Submission:” Three Take-Aways from Her Comments

March 13, 2025 by Leave a Comment

As discussed in the ‘Sunrise on the Reaping: All We Know‘ post, the second Hunger Games prequel is almost unique among Collins’ offerings in that she has spelled out which political message inspired the work and the direction she chose to take the story in light of that point of origin. Per the People magazine article:

Along with unveiling the book’s cover, Collins teased what fans can expect in the new novel which follows her latest prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

“With Sunrise on the Reaping, I was inspired by David Hume’s idea of implicit submission and, in his words, ‘The easiness with which the many are governed by the few,’ ” she said, per the release. 

“The story also lent itself to a deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative,” she continued. “The question ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”

There are three take-aways there:

  • Hume’s “idea of implicit submission” was her starting point, what “inspired” Sunrise,
  • the story she wrote “lent itself,” which is to say ‘she chose to make it,’ a  “deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative,” and
  • she tied it into her original series’ primary theme and with the world today by concluding,  “The question ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”

Let’s go through these one at a time, starting with David Hume. [Read more…]

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Haymitch and the Donner Sisters: Key to the Mockingjay Resistance Movement? Sunrise on the Reaping & the Pearl Plot

March 12, 2025 by Leave a Comment

I am re-reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes tonight after thinking more about David Levithan’s praise for the Sunrise cover. I reviewed Catching Fire yesterday because its Chapter 14 has the thumbnail sketch of Haymitch’s victory in the Quarter Quell that will be the subject of Sunrise. Levithan’s comments, though, I think reflect continuity between Ballad and Sunrise that is as great or greater than that between the second books of each three novel series, a continuity reflected in the Ballad and Sunrise covers.

While I do that reading, though, I want to share links to three Hogwarts Professor posts about The Hunger Games, two that I wrote fifteen years ago in the exciting months before the publication of Mockingjay and one conversation with fans immediately afterward:

(If you only have time for one, make it The Hunger Games ‘Pearl Plot,’ version 2.0.)

The ‘Pearl Plot’ was my guess that, consequent to the Quarter Quell that Haymitch wins, the surviving Donner sister (whom I designate as ‘Pearl’ because she is not given a first name but ‘Madge’ her daughter has a name via ‘Margaret’ that means ‘pearl’) recruits the conspirators and writes the Mockingjay rebellion counter-narrative that leads to the Reaping Day selection of Katniss (via Prim) and Peeta — and almost all the events of the 74th Hunger Games.

Needless to say, I hope, Mockingjay did not deliver on any of the Pearl Plot’s premises being revealed, which should have been no surprise given that District 12 is destroyed by the Capitol at the end of Catching Fire (Goodbye, Undersees!) and the third novel is crowded with Katniss’ victory over the Capitol and District 13 and her eventual apotheosis.

As more than one reader pointed out, though, in the discussion thread dedicated to the Pearl Plot after Mockingjay was published that Collins might be saving all that revelation for a Hunger Games Prequel novel. I hope you’ll read the ‘Pearl Plot’ posts and let me know if you think Sunrise on the Reaping (or the prequel series finale?) will include revelations of what really happened in Katniss’ Hunger Games before the pyrotechnics of Mockingjay!

Post (squared):

If you want to read my book-length discussion of the meaning of The Hunger Games series, it’s available in these three Hogwarts Professor posts:

Unlocking Mockingjay: The Spiritual Allegory’ On Katniss as a Soul Seeking Perfection and Iconological Reading

‘Unlocking Mockingjay: ‘The Literary Alchemy’ On Literary Alchemy and Peeta as Postmodern Christ

‘Unlocking Mockingjay: Katniss’ Apotheosis’ On the Alchemical Arena and Katniss’ Perfection in the Inner Sanctuary

All the Hogwarts Professor Hunger Games  commentary is available at ‘Unlocking Mockingjay: The Complete Set of Posts And a Round-up of the First 30 Discussion Points.‘ Enjoy!

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Sunrise on the Reaping: All We Know

March 11, 2025 by Leave a Comment

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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The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, First Thoughts on a Sad, Familiar Song

May 22, 2020 by 11 Comments

When I first started using The Hunger Games in my college English 111 courses, it was an obscure little book, and I was the only one in any of my classes who had read it before the first day. But times have changed over the past decade. I still use the book in my classes, mainly because I have not found anything else that works so well. In that time, movies have been made(with some of my students as extras), popularity has swelled, and my students who don’t pay attention to my constant harping on the importance of the number three in the trilogy (they are confused by four films), keep saying they want a “fourth” book. Instead of spoiling the beautiful symmetry of the original trilogy, the master Gamemaker herself brings us a prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which is both its own special sort of creature and a perfect companion to the original trilogy.

If you haven’t yet read Suzanne Collins’s just-released prequel to The Hunger Games trilogy, fear not, spoilers won’t crop up until after the break, but, if you have read the novel already, or don’t mind the spoilers, join me for a quick round-up of first thoughts, using the three major elements of the title, Snakes, Songbirds, and Ballads, but in reverse order (why? There are many reasons, actually, but I may fall back on the old excuse that I am an ornery mountain woman with excessive book learning). There will be many more posts to come, but we’ll start the dance here.

[Read more…]

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