;)
Sunrise on the Reaping is officially hereThe time has come!
Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping officially hits bookshelves today, Tuesday, March 18, 2025, bringing readers back to Panem for one of the most anticipated stories in The Hunger Games universe: Haymitch Abernathy’s Games.
Set nearly 25 years before the events of The Hunger Games, Sunrise on the Reaping follows sixteen-year-old Haymitch on the morning of the reaping for the 50th Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell.
Longtime fans have known the broad outline of Haymitch’s victory since Catching Fire. We knew he survived. We knew he became the only living victor from District 12 before Katniss and Peeta. We knew President Snow punished him by killing the people he loved.
But Sunrise on the Reaping finally reveals the story behind the boy who became the mentor.
Suzanne CollinsNew Interview With Suzanne Collins
;)
In a new interview with Scholastic’s David Levithan released for the publication of Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins discussed why she wanted to return to Haymitch’s story after writing The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
David Levithan: After writing in Coriolanus’s voice for Ballad, it must have felt like quite a change to slip into Haymitch’s point of view. Can you talk about what it was like to be wearing his voice and how that shaped the book as a whole?
Suzanne Collins: After traveling with Coriolanus, who is endlessly manipulative and controlling, it was a relief to wear both Haymitch’s voice and character. He has a much greater capacity for hope and love and joy. More than Coriolanus — or Katniss, for that matter. His voice is Seam overlaid with Lenore Dove’s Covey influence. There’s far more color to his expression, more humor. Sadly, at the end of the book you see his concentrated effort to strip all that away, so by the time you reach the trilogy, his language has lost the musicality of his youth. A combination of his desperation to forget combined with years of Capitol TV erase it. I like to think in his remaining years after the war, he reclaims it. You can hear it coming back in the epilogue.
David Levithan: It is a particular challenge to start a novel when you and most of its future readers already know its ending.
Suzanne Collins: It’s another way to approach a story, but it has its advantages. If you look at Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, we learn in the prologue that the lovers will die. So you’re really not focused on what’s going to happen, but on how or why it happens. In the same way, you know Haymitch becomes a victor and Snow kills his loved ones, but you don’t know the events that lead to these ends. How? Why? Where? What? Who? You have to read the book to find out.
David Levithan: In some of our initial conversations about the book, we talked about whether it would be written in the voice of the older Haymitch looking back or the younger Haymitch processing it as he experienced it. What led you to decide to take the approach you ultimately did?
Suzanne Collins: I played around with it both ways, but I found that younger Haymitch speaks directly to the YA audience the best. An older person reflecting back on their youth or shifting into a child’s perspective is harder to pull off. Good work, Harper Lee!
David Levithan: How do you feel spending so much time in younger Haymitch’s shoes has changed your understanding of the Haymitch we see in the trilogy?
Suzanne Collins: I don’t think it changed my understanding of him — Haymitch is still Haymitch — but it gave me room to explore his earlier journey. Like his relationship to Katniss via Burdock. What it meant to take on his best friend’s child and see her through the war and become her surrogate father. It was nice to have some time with that angle.
David Levithan: Like the other Hunger Games books, there is a clear three-part structure in place here, with each part getting the same number of chapters. How does this structure help you shape the story?
Suzanne Collins: I began as a playwright over forty years ago, and that dramatic structure became the template for the novels. Since I’ve worked with it for decades, it’s almost second nature, and that allows me to spend my energy elsewhere. This is the tenth book I’ve used this structure for, so I know certain things I want to achieve by certain points in the story. If I haven’t achieved them, something isn’t working the way I hoped, and I probably need to pause and figure out why.
Shop Sunrise on the Reaping here.
This post contains affiliate links, which means Panem Propaganda may earn a small commission if you make a purchase through the link, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting the site!