Three Days Until Publication of Sunrise on the Reaping!
Scholastic has released two short excerpts from the opening chapter of Sunrise, the second one being in the form of a reading by the author, Suzanne Collins.
Let’s take a paragraph by paragraph look at the first excerpt from the fifth Hunger Games novel and the second prequel. We’ll have the full text on Tuesday the 18th but the two teasers we’ve been given — tomorrow I’ll go through the excerpt read by Collins — are an opportunity to begin thinking about the new book in the context of the four other Hunger Games codices before we’re overwhelmed by the undertow of the whole story.
This excerpt appeared last week at BarnesAndNoble.com. My notes are after the bullet point markers.
Happy birthday, Haymitch!”
The upside of being born on reaping day is that you can sleep late on your birthday. It’s pretty much downhill from there. A day off school hardly compensates for the terror of the name drawing. Even if you survive that, nobody feels like having cake after watching two kids being hauled off to the Capitol for slaughter. I roll over and pull the sheet over my head.
- Sunrise opens on a Reaping Day in District 12 with our hero, Haymitch Abernathy, struggling to wake up. It is almost exactly the opening scene of Hunger Games in which Katniss is grumpy at her rising, also in a hurry to get somewhere on the morning of a Reaping Day.
- We were told in Ballads of Songbirds and Snakes (p 13) that Reaping Day is a fixed calendar day, namely, the 4th of July. There’s some irony here because American Independence Day has morphed into Panem District Subjection Day. It also means that our man Haymitch, being born on the 4th of July just as the United States conventionally considers that day its Birthday and national holiday, the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, is marked by Collins as an archetypal American, for better or worse.
- That or he’s Panem’s Ron Kovic, the Marine Corps Vietnam veteran who becomes an anti-war activist, whose autobiography is titled Born on the Fourth of July. Haymitch is a Quarter Quell Victor who becomes a driving force in the Mockingjay revolution against the Capitol.
“Happy birthday!” My ten-year-old brother, Sid, gives my shoulder a shake. “You said be your rooster. You said you wanted to get to the woods at daylight.”
Prim does not wake Katniss up in the Hunger Games opening; she is on her way to the woods at dawn, however. Prim like Sid, though, is the beloved younger sibling that we meet in the first paragraphs.- Elizabeth Baird-Hardy pointed out in her discussion of the preview-excerpt that the first bird reference is in the first one hundred words of the novel. I’ll try to track the birds as they pop up.
It’s true. I’m hoping to finish my work before the ceremony so I can devote the afternoon to the two things I love best — wasting time and being with my girl, Lenore Dove. My ma makes indulging in either of these a challenge, since she regularly announces that no job is too hard or dirty or tricky for me, and even the poorest people can scrape up a few pennies to dump their misery on somebody else. But given the dual occasions of the day, I think she’ll allow for a bit of freedom as long as my work is done. It’s the Gamemakers who might ruin my plans.
- Lenore Dove is our second bird and that name is rich. There’s a ballad called ‘Lenore’ that I expect Elizabeth Baird-Hardy will be telling us about soon and the more famous Edgar Allen Poe poem of the same name. As with Lucy Gray Baird in Ballads, whose given names are the title of a poem by Wordsworth, I think ‘Lenore Dove’s life and early tragic death will track with Poe’s ‘Lenore.’
- Ballad readers will note that Haymitch’s name for his mother is “Ma,” the affectionate name Sejanus Plinth calls his fish-out-of-water mom and which Coriolanus Snow thinks is a real tag of the Plinth’s not being proper Capitol, rich as they are. It was Sejanus’ last word as he died on the gallows and I suspect if Snow hears Haymitch use this endearment he will twitch.
- The “dual occasion” is almost certainly the coincidence of his birthday and the Reaping Day, though, as it happens every year, I’m not sure why Ma would consider it a day of special allowance. Because it’s a Quarter Quell and her boy’s twice as likely to be chosen?
- Collins seems to be in a hurry here to let her readers know that the Abernathys are a poor working family; there are tints here of melodrama.
“Haymitch!” wails Sid. “The sun’s coming up!”
“All right, all right. I’m up, too.” I roll straight off the mattress onto the floor and pull on a pair of shorts made from a government-issued flour sack. The words COURTESY OF THE CAPITOL end up stamped across my butt. My ma wastes nothing. Widowed young when my pa died in a coal mine fire, she’s raised Sid and me by taking in laundry and making every bit of anything count. The hardwood ashes in the fire pit are saved for lye soap. Eggshells get ground up to fertilize the garden. Someday these shorts will be torn into strips and woven into a rug.
- I mean, they’re “really really poor.” Ma is a single-mother determined to make it against all odds…
I finish dressing and toss Sid back in his bed, where he burrows right down in the patchwork quilt. In the kitchen, I grab a piece of corn bread, an upgrade for my birthday instead of the gritty, dark stuff made from the Capitol flour. Out back, my ma’s already stirring a steaming kettle of clothes with a stick, her muscles straining as she flips a pair of miner’s overalls. She’s only thirty-five, but life’s sorrows have already cut lines into her face, like they do.
Ma catches sight of me in the doorway and wipes her brow. “Happy sixteenth. Sauce on the stove.”
“Thanks, Ma.” I find a saucepan of stewed plums and scoop some on my bread before I head out. I found these in the woods the other day, but it’s a nice surprise to have them all hot and sugared.
- Again, Ma is a trooper — and she spoils her children? Why isn’t Haymitch helping her with the laundry business? Why is he so resistant to helping her with the cistern re-fill?
- The keeper phrase here, I think, is “I found these in the woods the other day.” We don’t know if there is a District 12 fence that separates where people live from the forest as in Katniss’ day (there wasn’t one in Ballads), but, if there is, then we have another Katniss-Haymitch correspondence. They’re boundary breakers and food foragers.
“Need you to fill the cistern today,” Ma says as I pass.
We’ve got cold running water, only it comes out in a thin stream that would take an age to fill a bucket. There’s a special barrel of pure rainwater she charges extra for because the clothes come out softer, but she uses our well water for most of the laundry. What with pumping and hauling, filling the cistern’s a two-hour job even with Sid’s help.
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” I ask.
“I’m running low and I’ve got a mountain of wash to do,” she answers.
- We’re told that Ma’s laundry business is how the Abernathys pay their bills. Isn’t it odd that the cistern water, the essential element of that business isn’t a well understood priority in this family? Why is Haymitch put out by this request, especially as it’s clear Ma went to some effort to cook him corn bread and stewed plums for his birthday?
- Collins seems to be going out of her way to paint the picture of a pretty self-absorbed teenage boy, typical of the sixteen year old breed, of course, but not especially winning given the heroic Ma’s loving sacrifice and the family’s poverty.
“This afternoon, then,” I say, trying to hide my frustration. If the reaping’s done by one, and assuming we’re not part of this year’s sacrifice, I can finish the water by three and still see Lenore Dove.
- Again, maybe this broken logic is meant to convey Haymitch’s immaturity, but, if he is selected, it means not only will his mother have a broken heart to deal with but she’ll also have an empty cistern to fill with her tears.
A blanket of mist wraps protectively around the worn, gray houses of the Seam. It would be soothing if it wasn’t for the scattered cries of children being chased in their dreams. In the last few weeks, as the Fiftieth Hunger Games has drawn closer, these sounds have become more frequent, much like the anxious thoughts I work hard to keep at bay. The second Quarter Quell. Twice as many kids. No point in worrying, I tell myself, there’s nothing you can do about it. Like two Hunger Games in one. No way to control the outcome of the reaping or what follows it. So don’t feed the nightmares. Don’t let yourself panic. Don’t give the Capitol that. They’ve taken enough already.
- This last paragraph is all over the map. We seem to be in first person narration, again in correspondence with Hunger Games and Katniss but then we get the first two sentences here that sound like they were written by a creative writer living in a Connecticut suburb rather than the Seam.
- The two notes Collins seems to want us to take away from this introduction to Young Haymitch is that he is reflective enough to be aware of what he is thinking (and whether he is on the right or wrong track) and that he is sufficiently savvy and objective about District 12’s relationship with the Capitol to resent it. Those are both extraordinary qualities in a 16 year old and mark him as very different than the naive Katniss we meet in the first chapters of Hunger Games.
Conclusions:
I’ve been re-reading the Hunger Games novels this week in anticipation of Tuesday’s publication and I’ve been loving it. Collins is a writer working at several levels, most famous perhaps because of her work’s political content, remarkably nuanced content I think, but rich in allegorical and sublime meaning. I couldn’t be much more excited than I am about the second prequel.
Especially because it seems Sunrise will feature Haymitch Abernathy, perhaps the single most interesting and mysterious characters in the original series, and because Collins has said the story was inspired by a David Hume aside (Great Scot!).
Having read this first excerpt several times, there are hints of Collins’ previous greatness — the name ‘Lenore Dove’ alone checks a lot of boxes — and reason to be concerned. I don’t like teenage Haymitch, frankly, and, while that may just be realistic story-telling (teenage boys are a selfish category of humanity), having him complain to his Ma who is breaking her back to support her family when she asks for him to do an important chore is a real turn-off.
Of course, I have so much good will for 40 to 43 year old Haymitch, mentor to Katniss and Peeta and architect of the Revolution, it’s easy to cut him some slack. I’m just not sure we should be, that Collins wants us to be; he’s going to be regretting a lot by the time the sun goes down on the Sunrise Quell and, if we don’t pick up on his laziness and adolescent preoccupations, we’re not going to ‘get’ that agony later.
Which is not to mention the near-melodrama of the opening passage. Ma is a near caricature of Appalachian get-er-done hardiness, not wasting a thing to keep shoes on their feet and food on the table as a widow. We get a lot of that in a very cramped few opening paragraphs.
One final note before signing off here on the first excerpt!
The last acknowledgement Collins wrote in Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was to her readers, whom she thanked for investing in “first Katniss’s and now Coriolanus’s tales” and “for traveling on this road with me” (519).
That was a pretty strong signal that, just as the first three books were the story of Katniss Everdeen’s three trips to the Capitol, the prequel books are going to be focused on Coriolanus Snow’s biographical turning points. Ballad set us up for a book with Livia Cardew as Snow’s wife and his consolidation of power as Head Gamesmaker and President.
And yet, based on this first excerpt, it seems that Sunrise is going to be more like the first Hunger Games novel than a continuation of the first prequel. As I noted, I’m on board for three helpings of Haymitch Abernathy backstory and how he came to be the “person who makes the plans” for the Quarter Quell revolution in Catching Fire.
I’m just hoping that, if the book does turn out to be mostly about Coriolanus Snow, the Panem Fandom won’t feel cheated.
Tomorrow, the second preview excerpt! See you then.
