We are just a few days away from the release of the second Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping. As we anticipate the story of the fiftieth Quarter Quell, forty years after The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and twenty-four years before The Hunger Games, it’s a safe bet that Suzanne Collins will once again use symbol and story woven together as powerfully as the bird, serpent, and crown that adorn the cover of this new volume. We now have a short print preview and an interview sneak preview that have given us a few hints, so join me after the jump for some predictions, based on those short sneak peeks and on some of the powerful themes and symbols we have already seen at work in the world of Panem.
Time and Days
In the previous books, especially The Hunger Games, Collins expertly places events on 
particular days of the week, and the Catching Fire arena was all about time, so it will not be surprising if she continues to use those symbolic tools. The bits we have so far already allude to time and day symbolism. We do have a very interesting new piece of information: Haymitch Abernathy’s birthday is on the Reaping Day. Since the Reaping appears to always occur on July 4, we can make a couple of interesting deductions. The seventy-fourth Games have a Tuesday Reaping, based on the days of the week according to Katniss. My math may be off, but I believe that means the Reaping for the fiftieth Games is on a Sunday. Ironically, Haymitch specifically says that the one good thing about his birthday being Reaping Day is that he can sleep in, but, as Katniss tells us, Sundays are, at least 24 years later, days off in District 12. In fact, that small piece of information is the key to extrapolating the days on which all the other events of the novel occur. According to Snow’s experience in District 12 forty years earlier, the Sunday day off was in place then, but since Haymitch is 16, all his other Reaping days on which his name was in the drawing would have been work or school days, so perhaps that is why he doesn’t mention that he should have had this morning off any way. If this day is indeed a Sunday, it means the Games will start on Sunday as well, a fitting placement for the candy-coated, deadly Quarter Quell. I look forward to tracking the days for the novel’s events to see how they compare with those in the other books and how they create their own pattern.
With the title, it is not surprising that sunrise is already a motif, with Haymtich’s brother Sid urging him to wake up because the sun is rising, and Haymitch wants to be up early. The second snippet, the one Collins reads, also includes a very thoughtful conversation between Haymitch and his girlfriend, Lenore Dove, about the idea of a sunrise on his birthday without a Reaping. We should expect that sunrises and sunsets will be powerful motifs. After all, sunrises are also favorites of Peeta Mellark.
Food for Thought
From the very beginning of the original trilogy, food has served as an important theme. Both Katniss and young Coriolanus Snow have complicated relationships with food, and the opening of Sunrise indicates that we can expect a similar focus in Haymitch’s story. As a District 12 native myself, I have been looking forward to hearing more of the voice of Haymitch, a character who has always reminded me of people I know (especially since Collins’s reading 
voice has a very familiar accent). He is eating cornbread for breakfast, with the treat of stewed plums for his birthday. This combination is similar to the Appalachian birthday favorite (at least in my family) of blackberry sauce poured over yellow cake. I’m hopeful that we will get more glimpses of food in District 12, as we know that the food in the arena will be poisoned.
Another food hint from the first preview was confirmed the second one. When Haymitch keeps stressing that he needs to get to the woods to work, I began pondering what sort of work he was doing, and I was already pretty certain that he was helping in what we here in my neck of the woods think of as “unregulated corn processing”—making moonshine. In the second preview, the bottle he carries and the mention of drinking implies that my suspicion of white liquor production and distribution was correct. Haymitch may be serving as a lookout (my own papaw had that job), or actually engaging in distilling. The fact that he has to get his booze from other producers 25 years later implies that his role in the production chain may be a less skilled one. I look forward to seeing how this job connects to his well-documented battle with the bottle later.
Family and Friends of District 12
Even though we have only gotten a small snippet of the new book, we already have some new names to ponder and file predictions for what will come. Haymitch, of course, we already know, but we meet, in the two snippets that have dropped, his doomed loved ones: his mother, brother, and girlfriend. We know, from Catching Fire, that they will all perish under the iron fist of the Capitol after Haymitch’s rebellious victory in the arena. But now, they are being introduced to us as full-fledged characters, with names. Mrs. Abernathy, worn down from life and prematurely aged, doesn’t have a proper first name, like Katniss’s mother, Mrs. Everdeen, whom we may meet later as a teenage girl. But Haymitch calls his mother “Ma,” the same affectionate name used by Sejanus Plinth and the source of his tragic last words picked up by the mockingjays after his hanging, the result of his betrayal by his best friend, Coriolanus Snow. Will the middle-aged Snow hear Haymitch call his mother “ma”? Will that contribute to his vindictive treatment of the unlikely Victor and the Tributes he mentors later?
The other member of the family we meet right away is kid brother Sid, and the rapport between him and Haymitch may explain some of his difficulty in dealing with emotions 
regarding Katniss and her younger sister. His name is of great interest. I can’t help but wonder if it is an allusion to the 19th-century American poet Sidney Lanier, known as the “poet of the Confederacy”; one of his better-known poems was called “Revenge of Hamish,” and Haymitch’s name is surely a corruption of “Hamish.” Lanier was also well-known for giving musical performances that imitated the sounds of birds, and birds, we can bet, will figure large. Stay tuned for more on that topic.
On the matter of birds, Sid says he’s Haymitch’s rooster, so the bird references we have seen before are already in place. Again, stay tuned. I’m betting on bird references galore.
We know we will have more of those with Lenore Dove, Haymitch’s girl, who keeps geese. Geese have powerful classical symbolic overtones, particularly in their role as “alarms” in Rome and as the special pets of the goddess Juno. Will the geese try to warn the doomed Lenore Dove? Will she, like her bird name, be sacrificed? Her first name, Lenore, also foreshadows her doom, evoking Poe’s poem and the maiden who is killed by jealous angels and whose crypt is visited by her bereft lover. Will Haymitch, like Poe’s narrator, lie down in the
tomb beside his beloved? Time will tell.
Time may also reveal how much more of District 12 we’ll see, but so far, I’m impressed with Collins’s cultural touches, like that cornbread, and the printing on Haymitch’s shorts. There are numerous Appalachian stories about humorously-placed print on flour-sack clothing (the one I already knew involved stuffing in a bustle).
I think we can certainly expect much more material for our upcoming conversations once the book is released, but I look forward to seeing how my questions and predictions fare as we go. Considering how well I predicted Haymitch’s “job,” I feel like the odds may be in my favor.
