Suzanna Collins returns to Panem with Sunrise on the Reaping, a powerful and unsettling look at the 50th Hunger Games (the Second Quarter Quell), and in doing so, she doesn’t just tell us a story about propaganda. She uses it on us.
We all went into this book thinking we knew the story. Haymitch Abernathy won his Games. It was brutal. He used the arena’s force field to outsmart the Capitol. We knew that. Or at least, we thought we did.
But Collins pulls out the rug from under us.
“like the citizens of Panem, we accepted what little we were shown.”
We’re led to believe that Haymitch’s story was relatively straightforward. It was about a clever boy from District 12 who played the game right and paid the price afterward. But Sunrise on the Reaping reveals a far more complex narrative about manipulation, grief, resistance and trauma. The book reveals how the Capitol controlled the narrative, both in-world and for us as readers. We weren’t told the full truth in the original trilogy because the characters didn’t know it, and so, like the citizens of Panem, we accepted what little we were shown.
That is the brilliance of this novel. It uses our assumptions against us. Collins forces us to experience what Panem’s citizens do: living with a version of history curated by those in power. We believed we had the full picture, but we really didn’t. Just like the districts didn’t.
“It’s a narrative that turns the reader into a character in the world, and in turn, another manipulated observer.”
This is a book about what isn’t shown on screen, and about how the Capitol turns kids into puppets for entertainment and not only crushes rebellions but rewrites them so it’s like they never occurred to begin with. Haymitch’s decisions, his alliances, his losses all played out under surveillance, but what the Capitol broadcasted, and what was remembered by Panem, was a sanitized, edited version of the truth.
By revealing the true history of Haymitch’s games, Collins challenges her readers to wonder what else we didn’t question and what else we’ve accepted as truth just because it was told to us. It’s a narrative that turns the reader into a character in the world and in turn, another manipulated observer.
By the time we meet Haymitch in The Hunger Games, he’s a drunk, jaded mentor. That’s all Katniss knows of him, and it’s all we know too. However, by the end of this book, it’s easy to understand why he is the way he is. Not just because of what happened to him, but because of what was done to his story afterward. The Capitol has buried his past, and even his own district only sees the after-effects of trauma, not the reasons behind it.
“It is not just a book about propaganda, but in a way, propaganda itself.”
Only in Sunrise on the Reaping do we see how calculated this was. Haymitch wasn’t just a winner. He was a threat, and so the Capitol made sure no one remembered that version of him. Sunrise on the Reaping expanded and reframed the Hunger Games universe, asking us what stories we’ve believed and why. It is not just a book about propaganda, but in a way, propaganda itself.