Fifteen years ago, I read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins in preparation for the release of the first movie. I was 18 years old, just a couple years older than Katniss’s character. Of course, I fell in love with the trilogy, devouring the next two books and seeing every movie in theaters. Nine years later, Suzanne Collins gifted the world another Hunger Games book with the release of her prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. She offered a window into the 10th annual Hunger Games through the eyes of President Snow as a young man. After reading it, I wrote an essay about how the Hunger Games prequel helped me realize I’ve changed. Flash forward five years, and she’s published another Hunger Games prequel called Sunrise on the Reaping. This one draws us into the 50th Hunger Games, back when Katniss’s mentor Haymitch gets chosen as a teen tribute.

Reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in 2020 triggered quite a bit of self-reflection for me. The tragedy of the Hunger Games and the violence against children affected me more viscerally as an adult and as a mother than it did when I was a teen reader. This helped me feel more deeply the ways in which I had changed as a person. I went as far as to say that I would probably not reread the series again.

And yet, with the publication of the new Hunger Games prequel last year, I couldn’t help but feel intrigued. As I began to hear more of my friends talk about loving Haymitch’s tale, I felt my old interest perk up. The teenage me that still lingers in the fibers of my being began to tug at my peripheral. Haymitch is a more admirable character than Snow after all, and a prequel exploring his time in the Hunger Games before becoming a mentor sounded like a solid premise.

My tipping point happened this summer. I work at a library, and when one of my library patrons checked out Sunrise on the Reaping, I asked him to let me know what he thought. With the film adaptation on the horizon this November, it has been on my mind more as of late. A few weeks later, the patron returned, raving about how much he loved it. He said it was his favorite of all of them. His enthusiasm was the flint striker I needed to revisit the world of the Hunger Games.

I checked out a library copy and submerged myself within its pages. Before long, I began to feel that mesmerizing tug, that elusive feeling when a story catches you and yanks you in, like my pockets and sleeves on every drawer in my kitchen. I found myself falling in love with another Hunger Games book.

So What Makes the Sunrise on the Reaping Stand Out?

Suzanne Collins has achieved something that’s hard for many authors to do. She’s written a prequel that reads just as good, if not better, than her original popular trilogy. She did an exceptional job of tying together Sunrise on the Reaping with the characters and plots of Snow’s prequel and Katniss’s story. She threaded in new lore about the mysterious Lucy Gray Baird from Ballads, along with interesting development of characters from the original trilogy like Effie Trinket, Plutarch, Beetee, Wiress, and Mags. I find myself wanting to return to the original trilogy and reread it, something I once thought I wouldn’t do again.

Collins layered more depth into this prequel as well. Her literary allusions shine and become more apparent in Sunrise. Like Lucy Gray Baird’s connections to Wordsworth’s Lucy Gray in Songbirds, Collins connects Lenore Dove from Sunrise to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven.

Her allusions go beyond poetry, though. She also continues to bring to mind classics in dystopian literature. Just as the Hunger Games nods to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, and Peeta’s traumatic conditioning in Mockingjay calls back to Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, the piercing tone installed in Lou Lou’s ear feels reminiscent of Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” Collins has interwoven these allusions into her stories in ways that are emotional and thought-provoking.

Through Haymitch’s story, Collins also digs into grief, loss, purpose, and hope in ways that feel deeper and more nuanced than her previous works. Perhaps, it comes with her recognizing that the teens who fell in love with her books all those years ago have grown up now.

What’s Different About Me Now as a Reader?

When I was a teen, I read for entertainment. I read to lose myself in a book, to feel an imaginary world enclose around me every time I opened it. When I was in my 20s, I read for much the same reasons, though I started to expand my literary horizons, especially as I began working in libraries.

However, when I wrote my essay on The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in 2020, I was a 27-year-old mother to a two-year-old son. The two of us were living on our own together at the beginning of COVID. It was a hard time in my life. As the world shifted outside with the fear and isolation of the early COVID years, my internal world shifted as I adjusted to life as a new mother. Reading the tragedy within Songbirds at this time devastated me. While I enjoyed the story overall, especially Lucy Gray’s whimsical character, I couldn’t get past the darkness of the Hunger Games.

It’s been six years, nearly to the day, that I read that prequel and wrote that essay. Now, I’m a 33-year-old mother to an almost eight-year-old son. I’ve weathered more in life since I last fell under the Hunger Games’ spell, and I’ve continued to grow as a reader. While reading for entertainment and escape is still important to me, I also read to think and to feel something. I read books that help me understand other people’s perspectives, as well as stories that feel relatable to my own experiences. Through reading, I hope to see other people more clearly. I hope to feel more seen, too.

As I read Sunrise on the Reaping, I drew more meaning from it than I did Songbirds and Snakes. After much devastation in Sunrise, Plutarch reassures Haymitch, “You were capable of imagining a different future. And maybe it won’t be realized today, maybe not in our lifetime. Maybe it will take generations. We’re all part of a continuum. Does that make it pointless?”

These are the kinds of words I’ll carry with me. When I’m feeling the hardness of life, like I once did during those lonely COVID years, I’ll return to these words. That’s the kind of impact I’m seeking when I read a book now.

A Last Thought…

Reading Sunrise on the Reaping made me think and feel, and it enveloped me in a comforting nostalgia that I hadn’t tasted in a long time. While the story had many dark moments, Haymitch’s perseverance amidst it all reminded me of Katniss’s journey and how I felt reading about her as a teen, devouring the original trilogy with a ferocity I often miss now.

While the days as a teen where I could spend hours reading without a care in the world have passed, I felt an inkling of that spark again while reading this Hunger Games prequel. Despite all of the ways I’ve changed, I’m also still a girl who will read a book in a coffee shop and start crying as I reach the last page. I’m still a girl who spills tea on her library books and rambles about the stories she loves. We can grow as readers, and we can find ourselves again in the books we read.

Our feelings about fandoms like the Hunger Games may wax and wane like the phases of the moon. Yet as I read each Hunger Games book, I feel connected to something bigger than me. Suzanne Collins’s books have touched the lives of so many people, and I’m glad to be a part of that. For as Haymitch reflects upon one of Lenore Dove’s sentiments in Sunrise, “Each book’s as precious as a person, she says, as it preserves someone’s thoughts and feelings long after they’re gone.”