They will not use my tears for their entertainment.

Haymitch Abernathy, Sunrise on the Reaping

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins is a significant new addition to the Hunger Games canon. Narratively, it bears a strong resemblance to the original trilogy and stands in sharp contrast to its predecessor, the “Snow book,” The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The novel functions as a tense, masterfully executed thriller, defined by its relentless pace and a series of causal, unfolding twists.

In this world—or so it seems while reading—no character is merely secondary, except in a purely technical literary sense. We meet Wiress, Mags, Beetee, Plutarch Heavensbee, Effie, and Katniss’s parents. There are many others, including the indispensable President Snow and, of course, a double-sized cohort of tributes. A full forty-eight children are condemned to die and, in this book, are dispatched with a particularly dramatic brutality, yet few seem unworthy of mention.

The protagonist, a sixteen-year-old Haymitch Abernathy, appears here with an intensity equal to that of Katniss Everdeen. Both are characterised by a potent combination of sharp sarcasm, cynicism, latent decency, and a burning defiance. The book’s narrative success is palpable, but the mechanism of its narration is also worthy of note.

The author’s deliberate choice of a first-person perspective is fundamental to the novel’s effectiveness. It allows her meticulous control over the reader’s experience and serves a purpose that transcends the fate of a single character to deliver a political statement. In Sunrise on the Reaping—a book largely concerned with the nature and mechanics of propaganda, prefaced with quotes from Orwell and Locke—Suzanne Collins’ primary goal is not to craft a conventional character study. She aims to further construct the universe of the series—likely to satisfy the fans as well as her own creative drive, born from a presumed love for her magnum opus—and to deliver a compelling political argument. As a result, a book that criticises the imposition of ideological agendas inevitably presents its own, however benevolent that may be.

In any case, by skilfully using Haymitch’s perspective, Collins sacrifices a small degree of psychological realism to maintain narrative momentum. In doing so, she solidifies her status as a master of polemical fiction, for this instalment is aimed not so much at today’s teenagers, but at the fans who grew up during the golden era of the original trilogy.

The Narrative Drive: Efficacy of the First-Person Perspective

The portrayal of psychological trauma in the novel—one of its key points of critical analysis—is not a narrative flaw, even if its depiction lacks clinical accuracy. The traumatic consequences are dramatically shifted to the very end of the book, particularly to the last two chapters and the epilogue. This misalignment between trauma and its manifestation should not be read as an inconsistency; rather, it is a direct and necessary by-product of the first-person perspective Collins employs to manipulate her story.

Collins tactically, almost claustrophobically, places the reader within the confines of Haymitch’s consciousness. This forces us to experience the world of the Fiftieth Hunger Games—the Second Quarter Quell—precisely as he perceives it. Such an approach, even with its incomplete portrayal of traumatic stress, functions as a narrative tool in service of the author’s ultimately achieved goals.

The descriptive passages and Haymitch’s internal thoughts are the dynamics that guide both him and us as readers, and they are distilled down to a focus on survival, external threats, and calculated manoeuvres. Where he might have been vomiting from the stress after the Reaping, he instead voraciously devours sandwiches; where he might have been hyperventilating from anxiety, he speaks to his fellow tributes with an unconvincing coherence and calm, almost giving the impression that he is quite relaxed in the hell he is enduring. This is, after all, a series about trauma, and trauma can be a single event, a series of events, or a complex, prolonged experience (Judith Herman, 1992).

This holds true for most of the novel. Therefore, when the delayed reaction finally arrives, it hits like a tsunami. All the story’s emotional explosives are detonated at once in the closing chapters and the epilogue—especially when we add to this charge all the revealed connections to Lucy Gray Baird and Katniss.

The louder thoughts in the internal monologues, the rhetorical questions in his laments, and the bitter comments are all written to foster an emotional connection with the protagonist in the reader, and later, the reader’s own reaction. The symptoms of this psychological and almost absurd catastrophe are present but poorly synchronised with the rest of the narrative. Haymitch’s shock is not shown to the reader through the deathly quiet prose of physical and psychological paralysis (that “freeze” in fight/flight/freeze), where neither struggle nor escape is an option, nor through a narration of panic and incoherence. This is not because he lacks the capacity for strategic problem-solving or reflection, through which he lays out an entire album of memories for us. As readers trapped in his mind, we are forced to catalogue territorial and physical disasters, not the introspective virus of emotional horror. That is the tsunami that arrives at the end, where the reader, if sufficiently invested, also loses control.

Millions of such readers exist online who, ever since the book’s announcement to this day, have been posting with increasing frequency across social media, forums, and blogs. There is a sea of reels where book bloggers are weeping with the book in their hands, sending thoughtful messages to the author and the entire fandom. To say that Collins succeeded in her aims, received excellent reviews, and climbed to the top of bestseller lists worldwide would be an understatement. Her sharp sense for controlled narrative and her long-honed technique of manipulating the emotions of both fictional and real people shine here more brightly than in any previous book. Collins masterfully directs the feelings of both protagonist and reader, precisely timing their synchronisation; when the accumulated traumatic reaction finally explodes in District 12, it also explodes for those invested readers beyond the page. The success is all the greater because Haymitch was a beloved character long before Sunrise was announced.

This mechanism for generating empathy is further strengthened by the author’s thoughtful construction of the character himself, which directs the reader’s emotions from the very first pages. Both Haymitch and Katniss are built in such a way that compassion for them is almost inevitable, but their fundamental appeal is forged in a shared architecture of tragedy: both are defined by a protective love for a younger sibling and the brutal punishment of that love by said sibling’s death—a key element in the entire repertoire. Such a complex trauma creates an instant and deep bond with a readership that has already absorbed the original trilogy, along with the indispensable Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which serves here as an amplifier.

The reader is practically manipulated into an emotional stake and an unconditional pact of support—and once that fierce loyalty is established by skilfully excavating and reassembling feelings in both Haymitch and the audience, objectivity is compromised. The reader ceases to be a neutral observer; they become a devoted supporter, prepared to “follow” the character anywhere. The political lessons that follow are therefore not absorbed as abstract doctrine, but as an essential truth in the struggle for the survival of a beloved character. This is the foundational layer of the controlled narrative: the character is manipulated by the plot, the plot by the author, and the reader by their love for the character.

This narrative choice is calculated and extremely effective. With a clinically realistic depiction of acute trauma—with all that it entails: freezing, dissociation, a loss of coherence in consciousness and thus in expression, severe physical reactions—the author would have halted most of the story’s driving forces, and we would not have even reached the arena.

Collins, therefore, strategically withholds immediate physical reactions. Her logic is clear: for Haymitch to reach the point of total collapse, the reaction to the trauma must first be temporarily “amputated,” and then returned instantly and in its entirety. Only when he survives can Haymitch finally and truly lose everything he has and loves; no Games have a winner, only a surviving human wreck. The author’s goal is not a quiet literary study of a traumatised character, but a high-stakes thriller, impeccably executed as such.

When that delayed reaction is finally triggered, the full emotional weight culminates with devastating force in the final two chapters and the epilogue. Consequently, the carefully crafted composure that Haymitch was forced to project finally shatters. It is this final depiction of his psychological collapse after a very gentle build-up that magnifies the overall sense of powerlessness, grief, and tragedy tenfold, thus acting as a generator, an accumulator, and finally, a nuclear detonator for the readership’s empathy.

I make no plans, have no hopes, keep no company, speak to no human being except old Bascom Pie when my nepenthe runs low. But I can’t say I have no future, because I know that every year for my birthday, I will get a new pair of tributes, one girl and one boy, to mentor to their deaths. Another sunrise on the reaping.

And when I remember that, I hear Sid’s voice, waking me the morning that raven first tapped on my chamber door.

“Happy birthday, Haymitch!”

Yet, the most sophisticated function of the author’s technique lies in the ethical questions it poses to the reader. These questions can be traced through the lens of Haymitch’s vow—“They will not use my tears for their entertainment”—and the dynamics of its profound irony. This is a powerful act of defiance, an attempt to preserve a final shred of dignity. With this vow, he defiantly refuses to participate in the Capitol’s objectification and monetisation of child torture, and the transformation of the same into an expendable necessity to maintain “peace”—though, in Sunrise, we finally see that there was unrest even in the Capitol itself, even a will to rebel, long before Katniss.

Here, the author places the reader in an uncomfortable, parallel role. Because, as we read the novel, what drives—and entertains—us is precisely the suffering the character strives to hide from the Capitol. It is our multifaceted investment in the character; for if he were enjoying himself on a beach with his beloved Lenore for three hundred pages, we would not be satisfied. His torment is the very thing that gives us reason to pick up a copy of Sunrise on the Reaping and stare at paper—literally—for hours. In this way, the reader, one might argue, inadvertently participates in this Capitol-esque voyeurism, for they too follow the events of the Games and invest emotionally—staring at a moving picture for hours—no matter how steeped in empathy it all is.

This functions, perhaps unintentionally, as the author’s most subtle critique. The first-person narrative is not just a tool for fostering empathy in tragedy, but also a mirror in which the reader can examine themselves as they consume that same tragedy as entertainment. The novel does not just critique the media; it enacts that critique upon its own audience, turning the very act of reading into a profound lesson in self-awareness.

“I guess Snow lands on top,” I say under the applause. Utterly guilty on all possible counts, I await his sentence.

He merely smiles and says, “Enjoy your homecoming.”

The Third-Person Contrast: A Study in Tyranny

The didactic purpose of the first-person perspective in Sunrise is most evident when contrasted with the cold, observational third-person narration of the preceding novel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The author shrewdly chooses a detached third-person voice for (future) president Snow’s novel. That book is less concerned with the origins of his tyranny than its causes; the Seventy-fifth Hunger Games and Third Quarter Quell—the plot of Catching Fire—were the very Games in which the Mockingjay became the face of a revolution that would ultimately crush Snow and his tyranny.

In The Ballad, Collins casts the reader in the role of an analyst, tasked with synthesising the internal changes of Coriolanus Snow, which stem exclusively from emotional loss and defeat. The goal is not necessarily for us to sympathise with him; she uses the third person because she wants the future President Snow to be understood, but not pitied or empathised with. The result is a unique character study and a clinical dissection of the shattering of an already fragile moral compass, leading to tyranny—an approach that allows the reader to observe Snow’s rationalisations and moral compromises up close, but from a sufficient, “safe” distance. The audience is expected to grasp the mechanics of his mental downfall and political ascent. The novel thus becomes a disturbing exploration of how ideology can devour a moral compass.

Conversely, the first-person narratives of Haymitch and Katniss are designed and structured to achieve maximum empathy, aiming to create a much broader picture than the psychological landscape of a single character. We experience their struggles with such immediacy that they become irresistible, and the protagonists’ hunger and fear take on an almost tangible form. Through this deep immersion into the protagonist’s consciousness, the characters become effective symbols in the history of oppression and rebellion across the Hunger Games universe, but they also become embedded within the reader themself.

Their stories transcend the study of an individual and become enactments of brutal, nationwide punishment. This theme becomes deeply personal for Snow because of the unforgettable and relentless Lucy Gray Baird. She only wanted to survive a catastrophe; he, an eighteen-year-old at the time, saw her as his first love—though it was more hyper-fixation and obsession than anything else. Unlike his story, in the other two, the reader does not merely witness the characters’ suffering but absorbs it as a participant, experiencing “meta-suffering.” Accordingly, the political stakes of their worlds are not perceived abstractly, but as something raw and deeply personal, especially for the fans who grew up when the trilogy was at its peak. Thus, the author’s critique of totalitarianism is felt as much as it is understood.

One thing is perfectly clear: the author wants to show how severe forms of political power and a specific oppressive structure can sometimes be founded on something as banal as the romantic infatuation and broken heart of an adolescent. Or not even a broken heart… All the suffering, agony, and shed blood of massacred children, forced to slaughter each other instead of aiming their assigned weapons at the enemy; all the buried and lost bodies, the disappeared individuals and the silent Avoxes—all of it can stem not so much from an emotional wound but, in this case, from a bruised ego, from a shame and injured dignity whose stench aligns with the strong scent of roses, his trademark and a symbol of romantic love.

I know one thing, though: The Capitol can never take Lenore Dove from me again. They never really did in the first place. Nothing you can take from me was ever worth keeping, and she is the most precious thing I’ve ever known.

When I tell her that, she always says, “I love you like all-fire.”

And I reply, “I love you like all-fire, too.”

The Ghost in the Arena: A Continuum of Symbols

The bridge between Snow’s private history and interior war and the public rebellions in Panem is built from a dense web of intertextual symbolism that Collins masterfully threads through Sunrise. One of the most affecting links is the verse from “Nothing You Can Take From Me,” which echoes from Lucy Gray Baird to Haymitch and Lenore Dove. Lenore, like Lucy, is Covey—and, according to fan speculation and theory, kin to Katniss. Even if she is not her relative, Katniss sings “The Hanging Tree” in Mockingjay, a song that outlived generations, whose lines appear in Ballad and in Sunrise. She must have heard it from her father—Haymitch’s best friend—who in turn heard it from Lenore Dove. That song is woven into the very heart of rebellion and of District 12, all of it laid across Coriolanus Snow’s back. Any of those lines forges an unbreakable bond among the Covey, Haymitch’s defiance, and the very idea of freedom—and together they establish a lineage of District 12 victors. They possess something the Capitol cannot touch, something sown into the soul of the Twelve.

I think of the Covey song, the one Maysilee’s mamaw used to quote when she was scared… Nothing you can take from me was ever worth keeping. The arrogance of those bold words. You can take several things from me—my ma, my brother, my love—that are the only things worth keeping.

Another song surfaces unbidden. Also forbidden. Lenore Dove plays it for Burdock sometimes…

Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
Where they strung up a man they say murdered three?

This connection transforms Haymitch’s victory from a mere political upset into a deeply personal war against Snow himself—though neither Haymitch nor Katniss knows just how personal that war truly is for Snow. To him, Haymitch and Lenore Dove—the blood of the Covey, the kin of the girl who defied his attempts at ownership—are not just tributes or rebels, but visions. Without even knowing it, they mock Snow—which is perhaps why the mockingjay became the symbol, and Katniss its embodiment, Mockingjay—reminding him of his greatest failure: his inability to possess or control Lucy Gray.

If we burn, you burn with us.

Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay

Beyond openly defying Snow in countless ways from the start—for instance, when he runs with the corpse of his “sweetheart” to the villa and lays it before Snow in front of the audience, then applauds—Haymitch possesses with irritating ease the one thing Snow could neither conquer nor keep: his own new version of Lucy Gray Baird. This turns Haymitch himself into a mocking presence, even when he is not directly trying to be. This context explains the particular sadism of Snow’s subsequent punishment: it is not the dispassionate act of a dictator, but the vengeful rage of an adolescent who, forty years after he last saw her—and sixty-four before he sees Katniss—is still haunted by the ghost of his would-be Lucy Gray, who taunts him with every new generation of victor from District 12.

I will orchestrate your death based on your behavior from here on out. You decide what you want Lenore Dove and your mother and that dear little brother of yours to see. You can die clean and fair, or we can open the Games with the slowest, most agonizing death ever to befall a tribute. And yes, you should be thanking me for giving you the option.”

I meet those pale blue eyes. “I guess you’ve got me.”

“Don’t feel too badly. You’re in good company. You know, my family has its own little aphorism.”

“What’s that?”

“Snow lands on top.”

The culmination of his personal war is articulated through the very phrase that is the thematic conclusion of The Ballad: “Snow lands on top.” It becomes Snow’s internalised weapon, a few words that both remind and empower him, keeping him at the apex, but also an assertion of absolute dominance—his personal philosophy, and its own justification. Haymitch’s victory becomes even more significant when he overtakes Snow’s aphorism and throws it back in its owner’s face; it is here in Sunrise that this psychological war reaches its zenith. With this subversive irony, Haymitch simultaneously acknowledges the president’s omnipotence over his life and mocks the emptiness of that victory and the system he has outlasted. Haymitch admits defeat, but he continues to wage the ideological battle. Even when “snow lands on top,” the spirit of defiance remains unconquered.

The chain of symbols is a phenomenon that haunts Coriolanus—or rather, a single, continuous symbol woven through every victor from District 12, living and dead, necessarily including Peeta, through whom Katniss herself survived and succeeded as the Mockingjay. The mockingjay, a symbol of the Capitol’s failed control, becomes the literal spark of the revolution, embodied in Haymitch’s flint necklace—a mockingjay versus a snake, a gift from Lenore Dove. “Fire is catching”—a phrase that also finds its place in the text of Sunrise—becomes a literal threat when Katniss directs it at Snow two and a half decades later, adding: “If we burn, you burn with us.” Likewise, “The Hanging Tree” becomes an anthem of the rebellion, thanks to Katniss. Collins has carefully constructed an entire system and language of symbols, and she uses this intertextuality—now a hallmark of the entire canon—to guide the reader through an entire emotional journey of broken hearts, “sweethearts”, defiance, sacrifice, family bonds, and losses, all of which ultimately serves the purpose of a deeper political lesson on the permanent nature of hope and the generational struggle against tyranny.

This private war of Coriolanus Snow finds its ironic conclusion in Mockingjay, when Snow, maintaining his bizarre pact of honesty with Katniss, reveals Coin’s betrayal. Katniss confronts him after her sister is killed along with Capitol children in an explosion from bombs delivered by small parachutes—just like the sponsors’ gifts in the arena—believing the order came from Snow. He tells her that, at that moment, he had already lost the war, and that the order came from the opposition: the future President Coin, leader of District 13, the woman who wanted to continue the Hunger Games with the children of the Capitol. Katniss doesn’t believe him, but when he reminds her of their agreement never to lie to each other, she realises it was Coin who killed the very person for whom she had sacrificed herself in the first book.

In doing so, Snow not only spares himself from Katniss’s arrow, which flies towards Coin, but he ensures the true success of the uprising. In the end, even as he loses the war, Coriolanus Snow finds a way to manipulate the outcome to his own satisfaction, destroying his rival by upholding a code of honour with his greatest enemy. He loses the war, but in his private and public feud, he wins the final battle, paradoxically becoming the very person who helps Katniss end the Hunger Games forever.

The Grand Strategy: Cultivating and Rewarding the Audience’s Feelings

The author’s choice of literary devices in The Hunger Games has nurtured a fan community of millions. She began with an appealing introduction to Katniss’s survival story in the first, action-packed novel of the trilogy. It was a fast-paced narrative, attractive enough to achieve widespread international success among young readers who find extensive description tedious and off-putting.

That introductory novel was the perfect bait and fertile ground for forging an emotional connection with the characters: survival, growing up in difficult circumstances, facing a force that makes you feel like an ant, and profound personal loss. Younger readers could easily relate to the sixteen-year-old Katniss and, in Sunrise, the sixteen-year-old Haymitch. It is therefore no surprise that the story, thanks to its perfectly timed narrative, spread among millions of teenagers, who placed their complete trust in Suzanne Collins.

Having secured that trust—from adolescents, a rather vulnerable group—she did not squander it on crude political instruction, but reinvested and amplified it. By deepening the narrative with substantive political themes in the sequels, all through the same intimate lens, she rewarded the audience’s initial emotional investment. The predominantly adolescent readership fell in love with the series because of the bait—the pace, the plot, the likeable characters, and a horror executed to provide the sought-after thrill.

They stayed, out of that same love, for the implicit political lessons, and even learned to enjoy that education. In a way, Suzanne Collins—with no malicious intent, quite the contrary—implemented a programme through the sequels: she expanded the cultural narrative towards a better cause, teaching about autocracy, authoritarian rule, tyranny, and survival in the worst conditions.

Judging by online posts, from forums to social media comments and blogs, The Hunger Games has itself served as a manual for a moral compass. Collins succeeded in creating an entire reading empire inseparable from the theme of revolution, and she decided to explore that even more deeply. In that space, a pact was formed: an unspoken promise that the personal struggle of one victim would illuminate a universal truth about power, control, defiance, and rebellion. The transition from a survival story to a revolutionary one seemed, from the second book, Catching Fire, necessary, even natural, rather than like evening school.

I didn’t want to have anything to do with their memorial book after the war. What use? What point? To relive all the loss. But when Burdock’s page came up, I had to mention him showing me the grave. And I felt compelled to tell them about Maysilee Donner, former owner of the mockingjay pin. And how Sid loved the stars. Before I knew it, they all
came tumbling out: family, tributes, friends, comrades in arms, everybody, even my love. I finally told our story.

A few days after that, Katniss showed up with an old basket filled with goose eggs. “Not to eat, to hatch. I raided a few different nests, so they can breed all right.”

The complex strategy that Suzanne Collins has adopted, on the other hand, creates a certain dependency. The resonance of Panem’s story now seems contingent on the chain of victors from District 12—Katniss, Peeta, Haymitch—and the central conflict between Katniss and Snow, who is himself fighting a shadow war against the ghost of Lucy Gray. Collins has built her literary empire on dense intertextuality and symbolic layering, but in doing so, she has created a kind of narrative gravitational force.

Any future instalment—whether it takes place before or after the revolution—will be consciously or unconsciously read through the prism of the emotional connection to the original trilogy and its characters, and accepted only to the extent that it is symbolically linked to these five books. For instance, the life paths and conflicts within other districts are unlikely to elicit the same reaction as the stories of Katniss, Haymitch, and Peeta, and by extension, the Covey, or even Snow. A story too distant from Coryo’s obsession with Lucy, the verses of the Covey girls, and the revolutionary spark of the Katniss-Haymitch dynamic risks feeling alienating.

By building her empire with her chosen techniques, Collins has also created limitations for herself: the future of the series depends, to a large extent, on its past, regardless of what the books are about. And in the years to come—judging by the unexpected Ballad and this year’s equally unexpected Sunrise—it is unlikely that the Games will end with Sunrise, just as it is unlikely she will fail to achieve the narrative goals she has set for herself.

Conclusion: Fiction with a Purpose

In conclusion, Sunrise on the Reaping is precisely the book Collins intended to write: an exceptionally effective thriller that simultaneously serves as a powerful example of polemical fiction used for a more benevolent purpose. The novel reaffirms the author’s mastery of narrative perspective—particularly the first person—as her chosen method for expanding the universe and commenting on public affairs, a mechanism for transforming reader empathy into a critique of political apathy. The third-person narrative, in contrast, serves as a scalpel for the precise dissection of a single character’s psychological profile.

The novel’s predictably positive reception is entirely understandable by almost every metric. Sunrise on the Reaping is a powerful, purposeful, masterfully woven narrative from an author who has complete and undeniable control over her craft and her message. It only remains to be seen how this, her most brutal and extremely gory novel to date, will be translated to the big screen. That brutality, which she could afford after numerous successes, is key to the book’s message. The question is how that message will be conveyed on screen if the violence is depicted with little graphic intensity. On the other hand, such an approach would be understandable, given that The Hunger Games is still considered young adult literature.

But we are left to wait and see the colourful arena through a projector, and not just the photographs from Spain.