Review: 'Sunrise on the Reaping' by Suzanne Collins

3/5 stars ⭐

My very first introduction to the Hunger Games was in Year 6 when my school banned it for its ‘gratuitous violence’; naturally, being 11 years old and just blossoming into the rebellious phase I would stay in for the next ten years, I went straight home and asked my parents to buy me the books. And so began my lifelong love affair with the death game genre, which has seen me sink to the absolute depths of literature, film and TV, devouring every instance of a group of people being forced to harm themselves or others. What a beautiful thing. 

Since I owe so much to this series, I’ll always harbour love for it, and I was always going to enjoy this newest addition. Unlike other death game stories I’ve seen/read, Collins takes care to place the Games within a world that would conceivably have them, making sure they serve a purpose for things like economy, politics, etc. It’s a great vehicle for conveying themes of fascism and propaganda to a younger audience and I think Collins has a great voice for the 12-16 age group. I was pretty excited to find out what happened in the brutal double-tribute Quarter Quell and get more backstory on Haymitch (who I could not stop imagining as Woody Harrelson while reading, despite the fact he was supposed to be a teenager – personally this improved the reading experience for me though). However, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed by the end of this.

The inclusion of so. many. characters. from the original trilogy made me feel like I was reading fanfiction, and I don’t think it was necessary at all. We already have three guaranteed characters from the originals that make sense to appear here (Haymitch, Snow and Caesar Flickerman), and everyone else just felt shoehorned in, to the detriment of both this book and its connections to the others. While as far as I could see it doesn’t retcon anything, it definitely comes perilously close. Honestly, I don’t think that Haymitch being involved in a conspiracy to destroy the arena was necessary either. We’ve already seen that in Catching Fire, and a rigged Games in BOSAS, and it took away from the most interesting part to me which was the Quarter Quell. 

The extensive quotes about propaganda made it clear that this was Collins’ intended theme for the book, but it wasn’t communicated particularly well in my opinion. Yes, they edited out the stuff that makes the Capitol look bad, as they obviously would, but Haymitch didn’t come off looking bad at all. I was expecting him to act heroically within the arena only to be edited into a villain by the Capitol and have to face the repercussions of that back home, which I think would have been a more effective way to explore propaganda as a theme. It also would have made the ending more poignant if rather than Snow killing off his family and lover, they turned their backs on him because of what they saw him do in the Games, and he is unable to convince them of the Capitol’s manipulation. Having them bumped off was extremely obviously what was going to happen, so much so that I didn’t even bother forming any kind of attachment or care for them because in my heart I knew they were destined to die.

The inclusion of Edgar Allen Poe was also a pretty bold choice to place right alongside your own writing. I like that this will help to introduce his work to younger readers, but there were some huge chunks of just Poe towards the end, and I think it weakens Collins’ writing just by comparison. 

Overall, I did enjoy reading this because it’s the Hunger Games, so of course I was always going to. I just think there was potential here for a much better and more heartbreaking story than the one we got. Also, side note – the main love interest is named after not one, but two cleaning products. Lenore Dove. It’s objectively a nice name, but I just could not get those connotations out of my head!