Title: Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (Hunger Games #0.5)
Book Beginning quote:
"Happy Birthday, Haymitch!"The upside of being born on reaping day is that you get to sleep late on your birthday. It is pretty much downhill from there.
Friday56 quote:
So don't feed the nightmares. Don't let yourself panic. Don't give the Capitol that. They've taken enough already.
Summary: It is the Quarter Quells which means there will twice as many tributes competing in the Hunger Games this year. Twenty-four in all. So when Haymitch Abernathy is selected to represent one of the four from District 12, he isn't really surprised. This is his story.
Review: Back in 2008 I became a Hunger Games fan. I was a fledgling teen librarian at the time and I was thrilled to find a book kids were really excited about. To a small degree the series became like that generation's Harry Potter. I wasn't blogging at the time but by the time Catching Fire came out a year later I was, so I did a combination review of books. Read it here. Over the next several years I re-reviewed both of the books once more (Hunger Games here; Catching Fire here) and had many more mentions of the books in my blog when I created several different lists of favorite/most popular books in the library. In 2010 when we were preparing to receive the third book in the series, Mockingjay, I was thrilled and created an announcement post. (Read it here.) I ordered three books to arrive the day it came out in August 2010 so my daughters and I could all read it at the same time. Here we are doing just that:
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| Me and my college-age daughters reading Mockingjay the day it arrived in August 2010. |
And here is my review of Mockingjay written just five days after the launch of the book.
Fast forward ten years to 2020 when Suzanne Collins published the fourth book in the series, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I was retired by then so I have no idea what kind of reception the book got in the library. Were teens familiar with the series anymore? I didn't know. My younger daughter, who was home with us for COVID lockdown, and I planned to read this one at the same time but my older daughter hijacked my copy of the book before I could get to it. Not together, but the three of us all read it eventually. I didn't like this prequel, considered #0.0 in the series, as much as the originals. (Read my review here.) For one thing I thought the book was too long and could easily have been published as two books. And I realized I didn't feel the need to know how President Snow got started with the Hunger Games. I am realizing just now as I type this, perhaps I didn't like this book as well because I didn't like the COVID lockdowns and had a lot of trouble settling down with books in general that whole year. Not the book's fault, but COVID's? Hmm.
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| Proof that the series was popular with teens in my library. Hunger Games and the two sequels (at the time) were all in the top ten for circulations in my library over the eleven years the school was open. I created this list on the last day of school in 2016. |
Knowing I was so ambivalent about The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I hesitated getting very excited about the fifth book in the series, Sunrise on the Reaping. You'd never know this, however, since I went ahead and preordered the audiobook to arrive the day it was published in March. In fact, I let both of my girls listen to it on my Audible account first. Then I kept putting off listening, finally resolving to listen to the book before year's end. I finished it in the nick of time, on December 26th. And here I am reviewing it almost a month later. Dragging my feet again. My last review from books read in 2025.
To say that I was delighted with Sunrise on the Reaping is an understatement. I felt like I was back in 2008-09, reading Hunger Games and Catching Fire for the first time. I was just as enthralled with the story and horrified by the whole premise of the games. Exciting parts were exciting and the backstory was the best of the whole set. But here is my favorite part, which was very different than the other four, Sunrise on the Reaping was stuffed full of poetry. The book almost sang for it. In my opinion it made the emotions of story more amplified. A good deal of the poetry was from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven". I recognized it. But a lot of the poetry went unattributed in the audiobook like the snippet below was from William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence". I looked it up. And I imagine a good deal of the poetry was written by Collins herself.
"A truth that's told with bad intent, Beats all the lies you can invent." --William Blake
It was on the point of the poetry that Don, my husband who listened to the audiobook with me, and I diverged on our review of the story. I loved it, he not so much. Or to be more precise, he didn't care for the way that the book's narrator, Jefferson White, read the verses of "The Raven." He read with a definite beat, almost like a drum beating out the rhythm. I interpreted this as the beating of Haymitch's heart or the drumbeat going on inside his head. A picky detail but it lost a rating point for Don. I gave the book a 5-star rating, he gave it 4-stars.
As you can see from this disjointed and long-winded review, I have had a lot to do with The Hunger Games over the past seventeen years and have loved most of those moments, especially those shared with my family. Do I need another sequel/prequel? No, I'm satisfied with where the story let us off at the end of Sunrise on the Reaping. Will I read another sequel/prequel if another comes along. Yes. Yes, I will. I'm a fan, remember?
Now it is your turn to share what you think of the Hunger Games series or tell us about the book you are currently reading... comment and link up below.
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