‘Sunrise on the Reaping:’ Everything We Know from the Hunger Games Novels

Sunrise on the Reaping is Published Tomorrow! Woot!

Having reviewed the first and second ‘Sneak Peeks’ that Scholastic released to prime the sales pump in the run-up to tomorrow’s book release, today let’s roll through the first four Hunger Games novels to see what they have to say about Haymitch Abernathy’s Quarter Quell experience and about the life of Coriolanus Snow, the presumed split focus of Sunrise. I’m looking at my notes that I made last week during a rapid re-read of the series thus far — and I’m wondering if an author has ever published a novel whose major plot points are as well known as those in Sunrise on the Reaping.

Book by book then! I’ll close with Sunrise predictions based on what we know — and how the second prequel may set up the third.

The Hunger Games

• Madge Undersee and her Aunt Donner’s Mockingjay pin

Chapter 3 of the first Hunger Games novel is crowded with people rushing to say goodbye to Katniss at the Justice Building before her train leaves for the Capitol and she goes to her almost certain death. She meets briefly with her mother and Prim, Peeta’s father the baker, Madge Undersee, and Gale. All those conversations are telling in their way but the most mysterious and telling encounter is her brief meeting with the young friend Katniss doesn’t really think of as a friend, the Mayor’s daughter, Madge.

Madge gives her the Mockingjay pin to wear as her District 12 token in the arena, makes her promise to wear it, and kisses her on the cheek. Katniss, after her conversation with Gale, reflects on the Mockingjay, its history as part Capitol Muttation part breeding miracle, and her memories of her father singing to these avian recorders.  She concludes: “Still, there’s something comforting about the little bird. It’s like having a piece of my father with me, protecting me. I fasten the pin onto my shirt, and with the dark green fabric, I can almost imagine the mockingjay flying through the trees” (43-44).

There’s a lot to unpack there, especially when tied to the “tongues of fire” aside about Katniss’s interview dress, but for now just note how early this pin is introduced in the story, a pin whose symbolism becomes the token not only of District 12 but of the entire rebellion against the Capitol, and that, as we eventually learn, it has a strong connection with Haymitch’s time in the arena. Maysilee Donner, one of his fellow District 12 tributes, was the original owner of the mockingjay pin (Catching Fire, chapter 7), and we have to wonder if Haymitch remembers this. Expect it to come up in Sunrise on the Reaping.

• Template of Sunrise? Echoes of opening in Sneak Peeks

As noted in yesterday’s post here and the one the day before, both of the Scholastic ‘Sneak Peeks’ were heavy in resonances with the first Hunger Games novel: the wake-up for an early morning trip to the woods on Reaping Day, a food gift from family, a note that Haymitch found the plums in the forest (he’s a forager?), the slightly off relationship with the widow-mother, the beloved younger sibling, the borderline clandestine meeting with a dear friend of the opposite sex and conversation on the edge of argument about the Reaping, Buttercup the cat and Lenore’s geese not being friends of our heroine and hero.

That’s a bunch of parallels, no? I think we’re looking at a trip to the Capitol and to the arena for Haymitch that will look a lot like Katniss’s and that the differences will be markers of what Haymitch wants to be sure to teach the Boy with the Bread and the Girl on Fire twenty-four years later.

• Wolf Muttations

Perhaps the most frightening moment in the arena comes at the end of chapter 24 and most of 25 when what seem to be a cross between wolves and super-soldiers attack Cato, Katniss, and Peeta. We meet in Mockingjay an even more deadly variant — add lizards! — of this Capitol breeding project in that city’s sewers and tunnels, but their first appearance in the series and the haunting suggestion that the Gamesmakers have inlaid the eyes and characters of the dead tributes into their genetic stew that we are to meet again and again in the series.

As Peeta accuses Katniss in the series finale, all of us, like it or not are necessarily muttations of Capitol designed messaging that distorts the natural and good into something only concerned with individual advantage and maintaining the greatest possible space between Self and Other. I think we can expect that messaging in the Quarter Quell arena and from Lenore Dove.

• The War Between Art and Politics

Perhaps the most important scene in Book One of The Hunger Games series is on the Training Center roof the night before the tributes enter the arena. Peeta explains to Katniss that he doesn’t want to die within the Capitol’s rules and political narrative, i.e., as is spelled out more clearly in Ballad, that human beings are murderous animals when not subject to authoritarian control. He wants to send a message contrary to that Hobbesian “nasty, brutish, and short” world view, one that involves love and beauty.

Katniss doesn’t understand this at first but has more than one epiphany during her first Games, especially at the death of Rue, of what Peeta was aiming for. We see it again in Catching Fire in the tributes private training session with the Gamesmakers and in Katniss’s inspiring “Propos” from District 8 and District 2 in Mockingjay. Lucy Gray Baird’s dresses and songs in Ballad have a similar effect. Look for that again in Sunrise on the Reaping.

Catching Fire

• Haymitch’s Quarter Quell

In chapter 14 of the second novel in the series we get to watch the story of Sunrise on the Reaping, Haymitch’s Quarter Quell, along with Katniss and Peeta on the train to the Capitol. We watch the Reaping in District 12, Haymitch’s interview with Caesar Flickerman, Haymitch’s ‘find-the-arena-edge’ plan, his alliance with Maysille, her death, and his victory consequent to turning the arena boundary into his own weapon. Katniss’s conclusion, “It’s almost as bad as us and the berries” in sticking it to the Capitol, compels Haymitch, off the wagon suddenly (consequent to watching the Quarter Quell agony?), to note, “Almost, but not quite.”

No doubt the reality of Haymitch’s trip into the arena differs profoundly from the Capitol’s packaging of it — as we will learn tomorrow! But we know much, much more about Haymitch’s Quarter Quell than we have known about any of the previous books’ Games. Collins will certainly be adding hundreds of pages of detail, but we know that Haymitch survives (duh), his strategy, and that it was considered a rebellion by the Capitol. That’s a much bigger tipping of the hand in a card game than you’re ever going to see in a Sneak Peek or Amazon blurb.

• Haymitch’s Explanation in District 11 of a Hunger Games Victor’s Life

Similarly, in the Victory Tour Haymitch makes with Katniss, Peeta, their stylists and prep teams, after the massacre in the District 11 public square, Haymitch spells out what his life as a Hunger Games Victor has been and will be for Miss Everdeen and Master Mellark, if they’re lucky. “You’ll see the choices you have to make [as a Mentor]. If we survive this,” says Haymitch. “You’ll learn” (67). Panem Fandom is looking for the cause of Abernathy’s alcoholism and Lenore Dove’s demise at the end of Sunrise looks like our best bet; if that didn’t push him into the booze, though, having to choose each year about which District 12 tribute to try and save — and which to write off — may have been sufficient cause.

[Aside: given the relatively small size of District 12, it is remarkable that the parents of the tributes who died every year for twenty-four years after the 50th Hunger Games didn’t make Haymitch’s life miserable for failing to coach a single child or adolescent to victory. There can’t have been any good feeling about him, though, and his being a drunk when their children’s lives might depend on him you’d think would cause a bitterness beat-down every so often. And why isn’t his back story well-known? Peeta and Katniss know nothing about their mentor’s mother, brother, or girlfriend. Looks like a story hole, one perhaps we may see filled tomorrow.]

• Haymitch’s ‘Making the Plans’ — and becoming a Gamesmaker

Haymitch’s life as a mentor hasn’t been spent entirely in a drunken stupor. at the end of Catching Fire, we learn that many of the Victors have conspired with the Capitol’s Head Gamesmaker and District 13 to rescue the Mockingjay from the Quarter Quell arena and thereby ignite rebellion in every District. Haymitch’s caustic, “See this why no one lets you make the plans,” to Katniss reveals that District 12’s Foster Brooks Victor is a great actor, something akin to Machiavelli in his cunning, and a man with a profound hatred for the Capitol, one that almost certainly began on his birthday Reaping twenty-five years prior.

We find out why that is so in Mockingjay, but that it is so comes in Catching Fire.

• Monkey Muttations

I found every Hunger Games novel’s muttations one order of magnitude more frightening than the previous one (if you count Ballad‘s snakes a la Dr Gaul as the first chronologically). Chapters 21 and 22 and the near death of Finnick, Katniss, and Peeta in the avalanche of super-monkees was nightmare worthy. Collins used the “evolutionary” ancestor of mankind here to make her point — well, Dr Gaul’s and Coriolanus Snow’s point — that all men are at base animals and murderous, everyone restrained only by fear of punishment and Draconian controls of government.

Mockingjay

• The Consequences of Haymitch’s Victory (and Lenore’s interviews?)

We get the Sunrise story outline in Catching Fire but we get its finish in Mockingjay‘s chapter 12 (pp 172-173).

The crew hurries inside to edit the [talk by Finnick], and Plutarch leads Finnick off for a chat, probably to see if he has any more stories [about President Snow] and life as a Victor]. I’m left with Haymitch in the rubble, wondering if Finnick’s fate would have one day been mine. Why not? Snow could have gotten a really good price for the girl on fire.

“Is that what happened to you?” I ask Haymitch.

“No. My mother and younger brother. My girl. They were all dead two weeks after I was crowned victor. Because of that stunt I pulled with the force field,” he answers. “Snow had no one to use against me [to make me prostitute myself the way he did Finnick].”

“I’m surprised he didn’t just kill you,” I say.

“Oh, no. I was the example. The person to hold up to the young Finnicks and Johannes and Cashmeres. Of what would happen to a victor who caused problems,” says Haymitch. “But he knew he had no leverage against me.”

I have to think there’s more to this story, 400 pages and 27 or 30 chapters more. Just reading Lenore Dove’s conversation with Haymitch and recognizing the Appalachian grit and guts of Ma Abernathy in the ‘Sneak Peeks,’ you have to think it possible that their interviews when Haymitch survived to the Sweet Sixteen or Egregious Eight survivors were attacks on the Hunger Games and the Capitol. And if his Quell follow-up interview with Flickerman as a victor was as dismissive of the Games and the Capitol as his preliminary tribute interview, in which he told all of Panem he thought the Games were “stupid,” Snow would have felt compelled to knock him down. Especially given his experiences in District 12 with Sejanus Plinth and Lucy Gray Baird (and problems at home with his wife, daughter, and Tigris?).

Again, Collins has told us a lot in her Hunger Games novels about the Sunrise at the Reaping story.

• Revelation of Snow’s Blood Sores, Poisoning History

Finnick in his Propo filmed above ground in District 13 on the day of the mission to rescue Annie and Peeta from the Capitol tells his nightmare stories of life as a victor. He was pimped by President Snow to the decadent oligarchs of Panem’s Capitol with the threat of killing the young District 4 victor’s family and friends if he did not comply. Finnick, though, used this subtle and demeaning torture to harvest secrets about the Capitol’s inner working from his lovers: “incest, back-stabbing, blackmail, and arson” are the beginning (179). He goes all in on President Snow, however, and his climb to the top of the Capitol power ladder via poisoning. How a failed antidote resulted in his own poison trauma, blood sores in his mouth that will never heal and which make his breath stink of hemoglobin.

the prequel series according to Collins’ Acknowledgements pages in Ballad are about Coriolanus Snow the way the first three novels were about Katniss Everdeen. I think we have been told a good bit of the Snow story that we’ll find in Sunrise.

• Real or not real? Not believing everything we think

Collins said as part of the Sunrise cover release that the Mockingjay key theme of ‘Real or not real?’ is also a docus of the second prequel novel:

“The story also lent itself to a deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative,” she continued. “The question ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”

This used to be a calling card for a political Leftist, an activist ardent in the cause of protecting free speech. In the role reversal of the American political landscape consequent to the Obama Presidency, however, concern about “the power of those who control the narrative” is a signature of MAGA Republicans after twelve years of having their free speech restricted by government agencies in the name of protecting the people from “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.”

Collins was remarkably nuanced in her Hunger Games depiction of the horrors of war beyond the death counts by also including impassioned calls for revolution within it, i.e., war is evil but sometimes necessary. That’s neither a pacifist or a war-celebrating position, something to be celebrated in any fiction but especially Young Adult Fiction which can easily fall into black-and-white messaging to keep it simple “for the kids.” Collins is better than that.

The same is true for how she treated the propaganda wars in Mockingjay. The canned messages written by Cardew and produced in a studio were lfeless and removed from the realities of the twin horrors and oft times necessity of war fighting. Collins showed that government messaging can be powerful and even good; Katniss’s Propos from District 8 and 12 turned the tide in the war against the Capitol.

Will she be able to sustain this kind of nuance in Sunrise, in which the power of narrative is noted and the abuse by those who control is decried? We’ll learn tomorrow — but I’m confident she’ll keep it ‘Real.’ It’s her signature as a writer.

• All of us media narrative muttations? Sewer Lizard Wolf Muttations, Peeta accusations

“You’re a piece of work, aren’t you?” Peeta’s verbal body blow to Katniss in Mockingjay and the repeated question of whether all of us are not subject to confusing real and not real because of our imbibing the messages of the elite shadow casters in our Platonic cave is the always relevant issue of “muttations” in Collins’ Hunger Games novels. I look forward to reading tomorrow how she weaves this into Haymitch’s story, beyond the killer pink flamingos in the Catching Fire version of his Quarter Quell.

• Fulvia Cardew! “Capitol ‘rebel’ — and daughter or niece of Coriolanus Snow?

Near the very end of Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Coriolanus Snow as he attempts to kill Lucy Gray Baird at the District 12 lake considers the kind of woman he should marry and comes up with Livia Cardew. Hunger Games readers blanched at that name because Fulvia Cardew was one of the Capitol Gamesmaker defectors to District 13 in Mockingjay. What a tight circle if we see her in Sunrise as the daughter or niece of Coriolanus and acting out in rebellion while becoming a power player herself.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

• Coriolanus Snow and Livia Cardew

I’m guessing it’s not a happy marriage! Here’s how Coryo thought of his future wife and about marriage at the end of Ballad:

Sometimes [Snow] would remember a moment of sweetness and almost wish things had ended differently. But it would never have out between [him and Lucy], even if he’d stayed. They were simply too different. And he didn’t like love, the way it made him feel stupid and vulnerable. If he ever married, he’d choose someone incapable of swaying his heart. Someone he hated, even, so they could never manipulate him the way Lucy Gray had. Never make him feel jealous. Or weak. Livia Cardew would be perfect. He imagined the two of them, the president and his first lady, presiding over the Hunger Games a few years from now. He’d continue the Games, of course, when he ruled Panem. (Epilogue, 516)

If Sunrise is largely about Coriolanus Snow as Collins has suggested it will be, look for the agonies of his relationship with his wife and their children.

• Tigris Snow

Tigris is Coriolanus’ older cousin and  both protector and provider for both the future president while a school-boy and their grandmother. She is fiercely loyal to the Snow family and to Coriolanus and it is suggested more than once that she has sold her body in addition to pay their bills and keep cousin Coryo looking sharp, expenses her fashion apprenticeship could not cover.

When we meet her again in Mockingjay, she is a caricature of Capitol excess, a stylist of many years in the Hunger Games who has changed her appearance into that of a tiger or super-sized domestic cat. How did she arrive as a shop owner that sells fur-lined underwear after her sacrificial life to advance the career of Coriolanus?

I think Sunrise promises either the revelation of how she and Coriolanus broke apart or the events in the Quarter Quell (where Tigris is still a stylist?) show us that break-up. Again, Collins has said that the sequel novels are about Coriolanus the way the first three were about Katniss; I anticipate that a lot of the Coriolanus chapters in the second prequel will be exposition of his marriage and his relationships with his grandmother and cousin.

• “Chaos, Control, the Contract” Dr Gaul’s Legacy

Ballad opens with five epigraphs the first three of which are from the political philosophers who, in the ‘Nature of Man’ debate espoused what Dr Gaul and Coriolanus called “the three C’s.” Hobbes gives voice to the idea of “chaos,” what man unrestrained by convention and fear of punishment releases into the world; John Locke is invoked “control,” how the state embodies the benevolent state of nature or reason which restrains man’s worst impulses; Rousseau’s Social Contract is quoted to finish off the unholy trinity of real politik. Coriolanus Snow in chapter 30’s meeting with Dr Gaul recites the “three C’s” catechism to her to demonstrate that his character arc is finished; he has totally embraced the idea that Capitol citizens and District inhabitants are “Creatures who need the Capitol to survive” (508-509).

That’s not going away. It’s how Coriolanus will justify continuing the Hunger Games and the subjection of the Districts — and why he will punish Haymitch for inciting rebellion against the “stupid” annual sacrifice of their children.

• Snake Muttations

Dr Gaul’s rainbow snake muttations are horrifying in their own way; they cause the person bit to transform into a snake as they die. That may seem like a decent death compared to being torn into pieces by man-wolves, mad monkees, or lizard-wolf-people crosses but for sheer agony, they’re at the top of the madness pile in the Capitol laboratories.

The reason I find them particularly chilling, however, and why I think we’ll see them or some variant of them in Haymitch’s Quarter Quell (the crazy flamingos who kill Maysilee and leave Haymitch untouched?) is that they embody the Hive Mind or “opinion” that generates “implicit submission” in the Body Politic. You are in no danger when encountering these poisonous snake-muttations if they recognize your scent, i.e., if you conform to this encaged creatures expectations and sureties of what is good and permissible. If you do not conform? The snake beast of indefinite number buries its fangs into you the venom from which bite makes you just like them.

It’s the muttations of the “three C’s” with a little David Hume and Dr Frankenstein stirred in (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the source of Ballad’s fifth epigraph).

Conclusions of Review of the First Four Hunger Games Novels

Collins has told us in outline and by suggestion in her previous Panem stories what is going to happen in Sunrise at the Reaping. It’s there in some detail but I am eager to read how she brings the interconnecting life stories of Haymitch Abernathy, poor boy from the Seam of District 12, and of Coriolanus Snow, poisoner President and power-mad potentate of the Capitol.

Accio, 18 March!

Ten Things That Have to Happen or I Hope (Expect?) to See

What would a day before publication post be without a quick list of predictions? Here are my list of ten story features we can almost be sure will be part of the second prequel, expectations beyond it being in three Parts with an equal number of chapter in each one (I’m betting on a return to seven chapters per Part after Ballad’s ten):

1. Reaping Day Trauma: Gotta have the shock and awe of being Reaped in front of the entire District, no, all of Panem! I’m especially looking forward to Haymitch’s farewells to Lenore Dove, his mother, and young Sid, but the train ride into the Capitol with three other tributes will be an education as well.
2. Tribute Training: We don’t know how far the Hunger Games model has evolved between the tenth and the fiftieth iteration but I’m hopeful that we will see the almost fifty tribute pack meet with one another, whatever guidance Haymitch and company receive (there are no surviving District 12 victors to mentor them), and a Private Training session with the Gamesmakers. We had none of that in Ballad but it’s been forty years and the focus of President Snow’s life (I suspect he may ‘only’ be a Gamesmaker in this book).
3. Tribute Interviews: Caesar Flickerman, anyone? We were given a taste of Haymitch’s interview in the Capitol-edited version of the Quarter Quell; the real thing before the Quell and after Haymitch’s victory, not to mention possible interviews with Lenore and Ma late in the Game, promise to be as good as Mr Abernathy can give.
4. Hunger Games ‘Quarter Quell:’ We know how it ends but I’m on the edge of my seat for how he comes up with the strategy to run to the arena’s edge and not to play the Gamesmasters’ Games as much as that is possible. I’m guessing Lenore or Ma tell him to run as fast and as far as he can from the Cornucopia, but it will be a thrill to see Collins again describing the madness of children killing children because that is how the Hunger Games work in Panem, like the sun coming up.
5. Coriolanus – Haymitch Confrontation: We have to have a pawn-power holder face to face. It could happen before if Coriolanus is the Gamesmaster; it will certainly happen afterward if Haymitch compounds the embarrassment of a tribute using the arena as a weapon against the other tributes. Look for a long train ride home, during which the District 12 victor will have to live with the near certainty that his Big Win and survival means the death of his True Love Lenore Dove and his small family.
6. Parallel Coriolanus Story Arc: Unless I’m much mistaken, Sunrise will be as much about Coriolanus Snow and the man he has become since Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes forty years earlier. Look for Livia Cardew and Tigris to play major roles; Snow’s unhappiness compounded with his bad memories of District 12 where he murdered his only friend (and his reverse image) and lost the only love of his life and experience of beauty all but guarantees no mercy in his persecution of Haymitch’s Ma, brother Sid, and Lenore Dove.
7. Donner Sisters Reveal — Madge as Haymitch’s Daughter? If you’ve read my ‘Pearl Plot’ posts, you know that I think that Maysilee Donner’s sister, the unnamed Donner twin who marries Mayor Undersee, is perhaps the Master Gamesmaker from District 12. In this overheated cranium speculation, Haymitch falls for ‘Pearl,’ they agree that they cannot marry because the Abernathy children will be on the conveyor belt to tribute status, so she weds Mr Undersee, the safe option. But does she have Haymitch’s child? And forever claim to have a headache thereafter lest she conceive one with Mayor Undersee? Crazy, I know. But we’ll know tomorrow, I hope, much more about the mysterious sister of the Mockingjay pin’s supposed owner and her relationship with all the players.
8. Meeting Mrs Everdeen (and Katniss’s Miner dad? Mr Mellark?): We see Katniss’ mom at the Reaping in the Capitol produced film as well as Maysilee’s sister. I’m hopeful that we’ll learn a lot more about them, even that we get prolonged cameos of Mr Everdeen, one in which he sings the birds into silence, and of Mr Mellark, the extraordinary man who raises the ubermensch Peeta.
9. Haymitch Triumph: Back to the ground of reasonable expectations, I think we’ll get to see Haymitch speak ‘truth to power’ in the first flush of victory and of anger after he’s won.
10. Haymitch Devastated, Birth of Pearl Plot (Sequel Three): For which outburst, of course, in addition to his pulling a fast one on the Gamesmaker-in-Chief, he will lose his family and his “girl.” That will set us up for what I have to hope will be Sequel Three, set in one of the years just before the Peeta and Katniss Hunger Games. Haymitch will be longing for revenge against the Capitol and doing all he can to get a decent set of tributes to work his plans with the allies he made in the Capitol and among the District victors.

Tomorrow I’ll put up the first of a week long series of discussion posts for early readers to share their thoughts. No one not wanting to be spoiled should read these comments.

Enjoy your first reading of Sunrise at the Reaping tomorrow; I know I will be!