As with the rest of the series, this was a dark book. However, it was also an incredible read. Collins manages to build off the world we know while surprising us around every corner. Reading Sunrise on the Reaping was like rereading the Hunger Games for the first time.
If you haven't read the rest of the series, you can start with this one. I think this book gives a lot of depth to Catching Fire and Mockingjay. The actions people are willing to take suddenly become painfully real. However, if you read this one first, do not read the epilogue until you're done with the original trilogy.
From start to finish, I stayed on the edge of my seat, needing to know just a little bit more. Haymitch's drive and predicament stay compelling the whole way through and, even when you know the consequences, you still want to root for him and hope for the best.
Spoiler alert: this is a sad book, but you should expect that from anything Hunger Games. It wouldn't teach the lesson it's pushing without the sadness, frustration, and grief.
Amidst the things we knew were going to happen, there was so much more we didn't know. We knew Haymitch was going to get reaped and win the Hunger Games. We didn't know it would be a rigged reaping and President Snow would personally want Haymitch dead. We knew District 12 wouldn't have any mentors. We didn't know that would grant a guest appearance of Mags and Wiress. We knew Haymitch ended up a drunken loner. We didn't know how much went wrong to push him over that ledge.
My only complaint is that I would have liked to have known more about what the people back in District 12 had seen and their perception, at least stated, of Haymitch when he returned.
Just a boy from the seams, much like Katniss, Haymitch was immediately likable. He took care of his family, shirked some responsibilities, and thought about his one true love before himself. Things seemed to be as you would expect in District 12, when one boy defied the capital, ran from his reaping, and was blown to bits. Haymitch's girlfriend, Lenore Dove, tried to get the peacekeepers to give the boy to his mother but they turned violent and Haymitch stepped in to take the blow meant for Lenore. Thanks to his heroics, they chose to take him in place of the obliterated boy.
Plutarch, the District 12 cameraman, allows Haymitch one last goodbye so long as it produces tears in his mother and little brother. Haymitch is finally carted back to the train where his fellow tributes wait. Louella is a sweet pea, Maysilee is a proud spitfire, and Wyatt is a calculated oddsmaker.
After they are stripped, gassed, and primmed, Haymitch and company are tossed into lame miner's outfits and thrust into their chariot for the opening ceremony. A firework spooks their horses and turns the whole ceremony into chaos. Louella is thrown from the open chariot and dies on impact. Haymitch scoops her up and flees the peacekeepers all the way to Snow's doorstep where he starts a slow, mocking clap.
The peacekeepers drag him away and stick him in a corner where Ampert, Betee's son, finds him. Ampert extends an invitation to the anti-career alliance. It takes a day in the training grounds, the careers' bullying, and discovering Betee has a way to disable the arena, but Haymitch joins the alliance with his fellows from 12 and gets several other districts on board.
Snow demands a one-on-one with Haymitch where he assures Haymitch he will die in the arena and warns the boy that any further acts of defiance will be met with increasingly agonizing means of death for his family in 12 to watch. He also presents Louella—well, a tortured body double anyway, for Haymitch and company to sell as the real girl he grew up with, but the best he can manage is to care for the crazed girl and rename her Lou Lou.
Snow begins puking up bile and Plutarch tells Haymitch to get the milk from the fridge, which Haymitch promptly guzzles and tells them is empty. Plutarch retrieves another pitcher, though Haymitch is certain he knows the other one is full, earning a little trust. Once Snow leaves, Plutarch gives Haymitch a second pep talk about not submitting to the capital.
The rest of the days go by rather uneventfully except for the night Wiress disables the electricity in the tribute building and Betee shows up to explain the plan to Haymitch, and when the game makers give Haymitch a 1 for his likelihood of surviving the games. After the interviews, Plutarch gives Haymitch one last pep talk, lets him call Lenore, and gives the boy directions inside the arena.
Let the games begin.
Twenty kids die on the first day between the bloodbath at the cornucopia and the poisonous everything. Wyatte dies saving Lou Lou. Lou Lou finds Haymitch and dies in a bed of flowers. When he won't give her body to the claw, the game makers send mutts after him. He manages to fight them off and tracks them back to the hole they crawled out of—the hole he then uses with Ampert's help to blow up the underground and flood the arena's brain.
It half works.
The arena goes on the fritz and the gamemakers send vicious squirrels whose only goal is to pick every piece of flesh off poor Ampert's body.
Haymitch loses it, trying to cut every tree down in sight. Eventually, he decides to try a more methodical way, busting the generator, except it's guarded by bloodsucking ladybugs and a maze. Haymitch runs right out of the maze and straight into a pack of careers.
Haymitch kills two of them and Maysilee kills the last, getting revenge for Wyatt's untimely demise.
They team up for a while and swear that whoever survives will paint a poster condemning the games. The alliance ends after they, running from the remaining two careers, stumble into a couple of game makers cleaning up the arena and Maysilee and a career kill the game makers. This leads to capital punishment via mutts killing both Maysilee and the career.
Just three tributes left.
Haymitch finds Wellie, the lone survivor of the anti-career alliance. She's starved and scared, but Haymitch convinces her to lay low a little longer while he searches for food.
While he's searching for dry wood, Haymitch receives a package from President Snow. His time has run out. It's time to decide: die looking selfish—drinking the poisoned milk instead of giving it to his starving ally—, or be the knowing cause of Wellie's death.
*BOOM*
The cannon goes off and Haymitch throws the pitcher to the wind. He finds Wellie's severed head hanging in the career's hand.
They go at it, gravely wounding each other. When the tides aren't looking so hot, Haymitch runs. He runs to the edge of the arena, where he finds the generator protected by a forcefield.
The career hurls her axe and Haymitch ducks just in time. It hits the forcefield and flies back, implanting itself in the final tribute's skull.
It's all over.
Except it isn't.
Haymitch wasn't supposed to survive. For his crimes and his survival, the capital treats his wounds while torturing him with drugs, some mixture of reality, and solitary confinement with a TV playing previous hunger games and the memories of his friends.
He realizes the threat his life places on his family and tries to make it up by humiliating himself for the capital fans, but it isn't enough.
He returns home to his mother and brother burning alive. His friends keep him from running into the flames, but they can't keep him from self-destruction after he unwittingly feeds Lenore Dove a poisoned candy. He loses his mind, pushing anyone he cares about far away for fear they'll meet the same end, and succumbing to pure drunkenness.
On the victory tour, Plutarch pulls Haymitch into an unbugged room and tells him he rattled the capital. He tells Haymitch that they made a mistake taking everything from him because now he has nothing to lose in a war against the capital's tyrannical reign.
This gives Haymitch enough pause for the rest of the series.
And makes me want to revisit every scene Haymitch was ever in because I'm a sucker for a tragic backstory!
