Sunrise on the Reaping
Sunrise on the Reaping is a young adult fiction book written by Suzanne Collins.
The fiftieth Hunger Games double the cruelty: twice the tributes, twice the odds against District 12. Sunrise on the Reaping hands the story to Haymitch Abernathy, a sardonic teenager who wants nothing more than to survive the day and stay near the girl he loves. When his name is called, he is shipped to the Capitol beside three other tributes and set up, he slowly realizes, to lose. Suzanne Collins returns to Panem in a hard, propulsive register, filling in a familiar figure's past and the machinery that shaped him.
Quick answers
What is Sunrise on the Reaping about?
The fiftieth Hunger Games double the cruelty: twice the tributes, twice the odds against District 12. Sunrise on the Reaping hands the story to Haymitch Abernathy, a sardonic teenager who wants nothing more than to survive the day and stay near the girl he loves. When his name is called, he is shipped to the Capitol beside three other tributes and set up, he slowly realizes, to lose. Suzanne Collins returns to Panem in a hard, propulsive register, filling in a familiar figure's past and the machinery that shaped him.
Who made Sunrise on the Reaping?
Sunrise on the Reaping was written by Suzanne Collins.
Similar books
Sunrise on the Reaping in our writing
- Companion guide: YA Dystopias: The Hunger Games and the Decade the Arena Ruled
A few thoughts on Sunrise on the Reaping
The rigged-from-the-start dread here sits close to Squid Game, where players slowly learn the game was never fair. Battle Royale matches the doubled-tribute brutality, and Silo shares the creeping discovery that the rules exist only to keep people down. Come for Panem's buried history, stay for the same unease about staged survival and who profits.
The rest of the Hunger Games saga, before and after
Sunrise on the Reaping hands the story to a teenage Haymitch, decades before he mentors Katniss, and it rewards knowing the rest of Panem's history. The Hunger Games and Catching Fire show where his cynicism eventually lands, Mockingjay carries the rebellion he helped seed forward, and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes goes back further still to trace the Games' cruelty to its start.
Deadly tournaments where survival is the whole game
Fifty years before Katniss, the Quarter Quell doubles the tributes and the cruelty, and Haymitch is thrown into an arena built to kill twice as many kids at once. Squid Game and Battle Royale strand their own desperate players in a contest rigged against them from the start, and The Maze Runner's trapped teenagers, in both the books and the film, face the same brutal math: only survival counts.
Propaganda machines that control what you're allowed to know
The Capitol doesn't just run the Hunger Games in Sunrise on the Reaping, it edits what the country is allowed to see of them. Silo builds a whole society on a lie its leaders maintain by force, while Matched, Delirium and The Giver show what life looks like once a government decides which truths and feelings its people get to keep.