When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.

We all know about the District uprisings that finally overthrew the Capital and freed Panem of the horrors of the Hunger Games… but 25 years earlier, a tribute named Haymitch Abernathy did his best to break the Games. He failed… but as author Suzanne Collins shows us in Sunrise on the Reaping, his story is worth telling.

I was skeptical, to be honest. Do we need another Hunger Games book? About Haymitch, of all people? When we meet Haymitch in the very first book in the series, he’s the District 12 drunkard, a pathetic former victor of the Hunger Games who’s lived alone in his Victor’s Village house all these years, failing each year to keep to keep any of the tributes he mentors alive, and doing his best to drink himself to death.

Eventually, he gets his act together enough to actually be of use to Katniss and Peeta, and later plays a role in the rebellion… but that’s all later. How did Haymitch, seemingly so pathetic when we meet him, manage to win his Hunger Games in the first place?

We never, none of us, had any choices.

In Sunrise on the Reaping, we find out. At age 16, Haymitch works hard to support his widowed mother and younger brother by doing odd jobs for the local bootlegger. He’s strong, devoted to his family, and madly in love with his Covey girlfriend, Lenore Dove. His birthday is never a happy one, as it coincides with the day of the reaping, and this year’s reaping promises to be especially bad: It’s the 50th Hunger Games, the Quarter Quell, and to mark the significant anniversary, the reaping will select not two tributes per District, but four. Haymitch knows he has a high chance of being selected, but initially he appears to have been spared — until an unpredictable event at the reaping forces him into the games anyway.

Haymitch knows he’s doomed. Only one person from District 12 has ever won the Hunger Games, although no one actually knows who this was — all records have disappeared. (We know, of course, that this was Lucy Gray Baird, victor of the 10th Hunger Games, as depicted in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes). As Haymitch leaves his family, friends, and District, Lenore Dove asks him to do whatever he can to put an end to the Games, once and for all.

“And that’s part of our trouble. Thinking things are inevitable. Not believing change is possible.”

“I guess. But I can’t really imagine the sun not rising tomorrow.”

A crease forms between her eyebrows as she puzzles out a response. “Can you imagine it rising on a world without a reaping?”

The best outcome Haymitch had envisioned was a quick death, to spare his family the agony of watching him die in some prolonged, awful way, and then a reunion with Lenore Dove in the afterlife — but now, he’s determined to fulfill the mission she’s set for him. If he can’t survive, at least he can try his best to break everything before his death. Maybe, just maybe, he can find a way to be disruptive enough to end the Hunger Games for good.

(We know he can’t, since we know the Games continue for another 25 years… )

As we follow Haymitch from District 12 to the Capital and then into the arena, we see a young man who’s very different than the bitter, ruined adult we know from the earlier books. Haymitch is determined but realistic. He knows he has no chance against the Careers, the tributes from the wealthier districts who train all their lives for a shot at Hunger Games glory. But Haymitch is not without skills of his own, and he’s caring to a fault: As he meets the weaker, more vulnerable tributes, he takes on the role of protector, and becomes desperate to find a way to shield his band of allies for as long as possible.

Alas, as we all know, the Hunger Games only ends with death for all but one of the tributes. As the Games in Sunrise on the Reaping get underway, the violence and death toll mount at a speed that’s inevitable. Here’s where the book feels a bit weak: Sure, it’s compelling and there are bursts of intensity and action — but, while the window dressing is different from the version of the Games we saw in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, it’s still ultimately an arena full of traps, an environment designed to kill in horrific ways, and teens who can only survive by murdering one another. It’s certainly not boring… but it’s also not new.

Purchase links: Amazon – Bookshop.org
Disclaimer: When you make a purchase through one of these affiliate links, I may earn a small commission, at no additional cost to you.