944: Sunrise on the Reaping Broke My Heart
In this episode, I was blown away and devastated at the same time…
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If I’m being absolutely truthful, dystopian fiction is very tricky for me. The bleakness of the premises often clash with their invention and creativity to leave me torn between awe and despair.
When I stop to think about it, The Hunger Games trilogy is probably the poster child for that sentiment for me. The sheer brutality of its premise rips my heart out every single time I think about it. Children drafted to compete in a televised battle to the death.
With all the violence and hate in the world, The Hunger Games reads as colder, more calculated than when I first read it.
Part of that evolution in my memory is because its prequel A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was awe-inspiring in the sweeping cinematic quality of its storytelling. The story of Future President of Panem Coriolanus Snow and his battle to destroy his own heart in favor of status, ambition, and success was a triumph of storytelling and instantly became my favorite of the four books despite the core story that enables this prequel.
When I found out that author Suzanne Collins was writing a second Prequel, this time focused on the 50th annual Hunger Games and a young Haymitch Abernathy, the hard-drinking mentor from the original trilogy, I was nervous.
Not because I had any doubt that the story would be told well. Rather, I was well aware that my feelings towards prequels were born out of the sense of inevitability that some of those stories foster.
The fact that the true story, the main story of the world of Panem was inevitable, all the horror and violence and trauma that Katniss, Peeta, and all the others would have to go through was inevitable, weighed on me as a reader.
Somehow, when the story was of a young President Snow, events were far enough away that I could be immersed. There was no way, I thought, that Suzanne Collins, would be able to immerse me in a story less than one generation away from Katniss Everdeen.
However, Sunrise on the Reaping to its infernal credit, did just that. I know now, that the fact that I took so long to read it was to spare myself from that sense of inevitability, but it was absolutely brilliant.
If you have read the original Hunger Games trilogy, a lot of questions about Haymitch were answered. I can only say that dystopian fiction of this style devastates me quite frequently, and this type of prequel made it even more pointed. Knowing Katniss and Peeta’s story in the original trilogy, and Snow’s story in Ballad, Haymitch came across as a very different character, a very human character. I’d argue that both Katniss and Snow had semi-tragic epilogues, but they had agency in their stories. Sunrise on the Reaping was the most inevitable of all the main protagonists’.
Haymitch had me hoping against the inevitable, and even then the storytelling and the specifics that got us to that point was even better than the vague imaginations that we had before starting out.
I will always wonder what happened to Lucy Gray Baird, but it feels as if she is destined to be the legend without resolution.
The Hunger Games have been concluded in the present with Mockingjay, but every one of the five books seem more valid now than ever. The beauty of books and the beauty of storytelling is that we have the opportunity to learn lessons from the past or the fictional, and try to do better.
Sometimes, doing better is all we can strive for in a twisted, hurt, angry world.
Until next time, keep your bookmarks close.
Peace, Love, Pages.
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