The Michigan Daily Arts section presents Arts Talks, a series where The Daily Arts Writers gather to discuss their opinions on and reactions to the latest and major releases in the art world.
In this segment of Arts Talks, four Daily Arts Writers gather to discuss the latest Hunger Games book, “Sunrise on the Reaping.” Full spoilers ahead, beware.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
Cora Rolfes, Senior Arts Editor: There’s been a lot of hype for this release, with five years since “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” and 10 years since “Mockingjay” before that. There’s a common saying online that Suzanne Collins only writes when she has something to say. How did you guys feel about not only the content of the book, but its timing?
Estlin Salah, Daily Arts Writer: It’s coming at a very poignant time. Collins opened the book with four different quotes about propaganda, and the whole book really has two primary messages. One of them doubles down on how much the Capitol controls the district’s perception of everything, especially with how much Haymitch’s experiences in the games are edited. The second message is the importance of community action — we get to see that Katniss’s revolution has been a long time in the making. I think those are very purposeful messages: Don’t trust the government; rally with your community.
CR: I agree that the theming felt purposeful, but I think a lot of the trouble that I had with the book was that it didn’t feel super cohesive with the characters and the story. There’s one example with Beetee that I keep going back to; Haymitch goes up to him during the training section, and in his head he’s like, I wonder why Beetee is in training right now, mentors aren’t usually here. And the first thing Beetee says is that he’s there because the Capitol is punishing him. I just felt the blatant discussion was a little jarring and not entirely convincing.
Camille Nagy, Managing Arts Editor: One of the things that I admire so much about the original trilogy is that it’s a book for kids, it’s written at a lower reading level and it’s accessible for younger readers, but it’s not stupid. It treats its audience like they’re smart and can figure these things out for themselves. Everything in this book comparatively feels very on the nose and very in your face. There’s the Beetee example, but there’s also — like you were saying Estlin — this idea that it’s coming at a time when these messages feel very obvious, which kind of makes me question how powerful they really can be. While it might be relevant and topical, it’s not really bringing anything new to that conversation.
CR: It’s like a baby book, like “Baby goes to the Doctor” but instead it’s “Haymitch Learns About Censorship.”
[Laughter]
Meagan Ismail, Daily Arts Writer: I also think it was purposeful with the time as well, but agree that they were saying the message, whereas the original books showed it more. The Beetee scene reminded me of Finnick and the punishment for him, which I feel like was also very hidden in the original books. But then in this book, they’re just saying things. Especially at the end, when Haymitch made the connection with Lucy Gray and President Snow, I feel like that was really weird and out of place.
ES: I think I missed that.
CR: When he’s watching the broadcast of the 10th Hunger Games he sees a video of Lucy Gray singing, and Haymitch puts together that the reason Snow knows about his girlfriend, Lenore Dove, is because Snow knew Lucy Gray and they had …
MI: That they had some type of relationship.
CR: Yeah, why does he know that? It felt like the only reason that was in there was for fans to make the connection as well. … I think that both this book and “Ballad” attempted to show a very clear descent of how the Hunger Games changed a character as a person. And I think with Snow, they do a very good job of setting it up beforehand. But Haymitch’s descent is a complete reversal of his character in the span of around 20 pages, which I do think served who we know him to become in some ways but also felt a little unearned.
ES: Why do you think it is a reversal of his character?
CR: He starts out as a very innocent, happy person, and he becomes this completely devastated, mad and angry drunk.
CN: I think the reason, for me at least, that it read like there was less of a real transformation or character arc is because unlike Katniss and Snow, Haymitch in this book was never really a character to me. Collins relied heavily on the fact that readers coming into this would most likely already know him from the original trilogy, and because of that, it felt like he never really came off the page the way that the other characters did.
MI: I only read the original trilogy. I did not read the Snow book, so I can’t compare to his narration, but I feel like part of it could be because we didn’t really get much of Haymitch after the games. It was very quick at the end. So that could be another reason why we don’t really feel that we saw his full transformation.
CN: I think that really is the crux of my issue with the book. It feels kind of like filler, and like something that she produced not to say something new about the themes that she explores typically through these characters, but instead to entertain. Which I think is so ironic and inherently against the original messaging of the first books.
MI: I understand the way that he reacted at the end, but I do think that it honestly would’ve had the same impact if Lenore Dove wasn’t even part of the storyline, like if it was just his family. I felt like it was thrown in to be similar to the Lucy Gray storyline from “Ballad,” and maybe the point is that they’re all connected through the Covey, but I feel like if she wasn’t there, the book could have still had the same impact.
CN: That’s a good point. I do feel at times that Suzanne Collins leans on these archetypes that she’s created and follows those patterns, almost to a fault. In the original “Hunger Games” series and in “Ballad,” the romances have intense thematic significance. Not to say that Haymitch and Lenore Dove have none, but it’s another element of the book that cheapened it in my eyes. I think one of the things that is so powerful to find out about Haymitch’s character in the original trilogy is that this is a man who not only had to go through such a traumatizing experience as a child, you know, being in the games and all, but then he also has to be a mentor for a district that year after year, never has victors. And he’s the only one. He’s doing it completely alone. And I think that is something that helps to make the case for why he would be willing to risk everything to take down the Capitol in the original trilogy. I don’t like pinning all of that on like a teenage relationship in this book.
CR: To be fair, it was also his family that affected him.
CN: But the whole plot of the book was essentially Haymitch trying to take the Capitol down. I feel like it would have been more realistic for him to just be a scared kid trying to survive.
ES: I think he is just a scared kid trying to survive. His internal monologue isn’t, “I can take down the Capitol. I am the sole being who can take down the capital.” His internal monologue throughout the whole book is constantly: “I am a girl failure. I am a wet sopping little meow, meow, man. And I don’t know what I’m doing.”
[Laughter]
That’s really what he’s constantly thinking. He just is doing it because he’s like, well you’re gonna kill me anyway.
CR: That’s true.
ES: And he even doubles back on it sometimes and thinks, maybe I should try to live. I don’t think the book is trying to pin all his revolution on necessarily just Lenore Dove and his family. I think he witnesses a lot of cruelty in his games because of the way that they keep fucking it up. He witnesses a lot of cruelty towards Ampert and Maysilee and Lou Lou and Louella.
CR: I thought that the snap from A to B wasn’t super convincing to me. Maybe him having to mentor a bunch of children from the district whose tributes never win, like you mentioned Camille, is what I imagined had broken him down. It might’ve been interesting, I think, to see a book of him, post-winning, and mentoring someone.
ES: To me, maybe I’m just a little bitch, but I understand his crash out. He goes to the Hunger Games, he witnesses the brutal death of all of his friends other than Wyatt. He sees Louella get stabbed in the head. He sees Ampert get ripped to shreds. He sees Maysilee pecked to death by birds. And when he gets back … immediately his mom and little brother are dead. He thinks, at least I have Lenore Dove — and then he watches Lenore Dove die. If I were him, I would turn to substances so fast. Especially because he already has this connection to making liquor, and he knows that people who drink, drink to forget.
CR: I think that the way that you just laid that out, I see that. But the way that Suzanne Collins laid it out, I didn’t see it. And I can’t pinpoint exactly why.
CN: Maybe this is me hanging on too much to the Haymitch that I remember and created in my own head from reading the original books, but we’re meant to believe that he is somebody who is rebellious and who will continue to fight past the point of it doing him any good. So seeing all these things taken away from him is tragic, yes, but I’d like to believe that he would have, even when he lost everything, continued to try to fight back in the ways he could. Not necessarily loudly or to any sort of success, but continued to fight.
CR: I mean, refusal to mentor the children is a way of fighting back for him maybe.
ES: Or becoming a disorganized drunk so that he can’t be prostituted or otherwise sold to the Capitol. He just becomes a joke.
CN: And again, I agree with Cora, I see that and I see how that works, but I don’t think that Suzanne Collins did that.
CR: I don’t know, Estlin’s kind of winning me over!
CN: They’re convincing me that there’s a better story in there, but I don’t think that anybody can convince me that Collins pulled it off.
MI: Yeah. I just don’t think it was done the way that I expected or wanted it to be done. Which is the way that Estlin described it.
ES: I think where you all might be coming from is the stark difference between the person he is in “Hunger Games” versus the person he is in this book. For me, though, he did become distinct and well fleshed out. He’s not super confident in himself, he lacks any self-importance and mostly just does things for other people, and that really came through to me of him being a protector. I think he is less 3D than Katniss and Snow, but at the same time Katniss had three books and Snow’s book was longer.
I do think it’s my least favorite of what she’s written, but I find it really hard to compare everything. All of the “Hunger Games” books are almost incomparable to this one, because ultimately Haymitch’s story is one of failure. And that’s always what it was meant to be. There wasn’t going to be anything rising from the ashes. We already knew that his family died and that his sweetheart was killed. It was mentioned in the original. So there was no room for anything other than that.
CN: The next question I had was, in an interview with her editor at Scholastic, Collins talks about the Hume quote that she includes at the very beginning of the book and the ideas that she went into the book with, which were implicit submission and the dangers of inductive reasoning. I was just wondering what you guys thought about the way that these messages are showing up in the text. Are they effective? Are they interesting?
ES: I think implicit submission is one of the things that’s definitely been done better by “The Hunger Games” and “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” In this book, Plutarch asks Haymitch, “Why do you not fight back?” or something along those lines. And the answer is that rebellion won’t put food on the table. And I think that that was a huge sticking point in Katniss’s relationship with Gale. Gale always had a rebellious streak in him. And Katniss was always thinking: And how is that gonna get me a squirrel? You’re scaring off the birds. Even with Snow, I’m not saying any of his actions are justified, but at the end of the day, everything he did came down to: He was poor and his family was poor. He had no prospects. He did what he thought he had to do in order to get food on the table. So, I don’t think Haymitch revisits that with anything new. But I do think the other theme, not always believing what you see, I don’t think that’s something that can be over harped on.
CN: Yeah. And I mean, I definitely think … this wouldn’t be a “Hunger Games” book without these themes. I wanted there to be more than just those things, though. Otherwise, what’s the point of having this book, other than to entertain us? Which, if that is the case, feels like it inherently goes against the message of these books … that we shouldn’t be entertained by this kind of story. We shouldn’t be entertained by seeing another game.
MI: This isn’t really that question, because I didn’t even notice the Hume quote in the beginning, but I just wanted to bring up the full Edgar Allan Poe poem. It was right at the end, and Collins said in an interview when asked how far in the future the Hunger Games take place, she responded that it depends how optimistic you are. I think that it really shows how, if that poem — “The Raven” — survived till the time of this book, how very soon it is.
CR: “The Raven” was a little bit like, whoa, to me. I remember thinking, wait, that’s a poem that I actually know. “The Raven” is such a famous poem that it totally succeeds in drawing attention to the fact that their world is kind of similar to our world, in a way that I felt was effective.
It’s really important to the series that there is this literary tradition being passed down that continues on as a form of hope and resistance. To bring it back to that point you made earlier, Meagan, I think that’s why Lenore Dove and the Covey are a through-line throughout all of the books for the most part. It’s nice to see that art is valued, even in a totally dystopian society. I think that’s something that’s missing in a lot of other YA dystopian novels like “Divergent.” It’s also the idea of community action, as Estlin said, and a community that has shared culture and not just shared space, is super important.
ES: I think I would have appreciated in this book, seeing more of Haymitch in District 12. With Katniss, you get this deep understanding of the community that she has there and even just of her character.
MI: I agree. Because I was honestly kind of confused by the fact that Burdock was supposed to be his best friend. I feel like they could have built up his relationships in the district more.
CR: I honestly didn’t have as much of an issue with that. I think at the end of the day, his mom is his mom, he’s gonna feel emotions toward her, and I don’t really need a super large amount of world building toward that. It started on the day of the reaping the same way as Katniss’s book did, so I also thought it was a nice, parallel structure with the original Hunger Games.
CN: For me, the issue isn’t that it starts on the day of the reaping. I think that that’s powerful. Collins didn’t really sell to me that this is a place this character truly grew up in and cared about. She told me that a lot. But I didn’t feel it.
CR: I wonder what a side by side of the first chapter of “The Hunger Games” versus the first chapter of this book would look like. There’s a lot of similarities, which I think is super interesting and it’s kind of surprising to me that you didn’t feel that connection. I will say, though, the whole drama that happens with the peacekeepers and Lenore Dove at the reaping, that to me was like, “What’s going on guys?” Did we need to know that kid’s name and his life story?
CN: Yeah, it feels like they’re throwing a lot at you but she’s also holding my hand the entire time. Which is not a super enjoyable reading experience.
CR: I feel it would’ve been more visceral if it was just like: the kid ran and Haymitch doesn’t really know what’s going on, you know, and then all of a sudden, he’s running to help the kid who fell, or whatever it was. Because it got bogged down by all of the context and all of the knowledge he has of the place.
CN: I mean at the same time, it feels like Haymitch is sold to us in the original as such a smart character, and it felt like there were very few times in the novel when he was truly knowledgeable or thinking about things in a way that demonstrated any sort of cunning.
CR: I think the knowledge that he has in the later books, though, is mostly knowledge of the Capitol and how the Capitol works. And I don’t think that’s something he would’ve started out with. That’s something he would’ve gained throughout his years being a mentor.
CN: Yeah, but he was cunning and smart and quippy and I feel like a lot of that doesn’t show up.
CR: I think that might be jaded and depressed. A lot of his development in that area comes from spending years being drunk and forced to watch children suffer. But I think the book wanted us to believe that it’s a change that happened in just one day. I would’ve liked, okay — I don’t want to see him suffer for 25 years — but that’s how I would’ve expected his character to come to the place he’s at. I would’ve expected him to try to encourage, try to help the tributes for the first few years at least.
ES: I mean, did we ever get confirmation that that’s not what he’s doing?
CR: Very true. But those issues that you have, Camille, with the disconnect between his character then and now, I think are things that are in that span of 25 years that I would be more interested in than the story we got, because it’s a story we also know a lot of already. I don’t know. Did you all enjoy reading it? Did you cry at all?
ES: Yeah, I did. I mean, it got me, I started sobbing on, like, page 41 when Haymitch calls Louella sweetheart.
CN: There were a lot of very sweet moments. It got me in the end. I’ll say I do think that there were a lot of very moving moments and moments that reinforced my love for Haymitch. I want to be clear. I don’t hate this book. I’m just let down by it. I trusted her so much as an author before this. I love the original books, and I’ve read them recently. It’s not a thing where I’m misremembering them. I think that they’re very good. Even “Ballad” got some unnecessary flack in terms of not being as deep. I thought it was and that it did what it sought out to do very well. This book feels like there was a lot less thought put into it and a lot less effort. I don’t know, like I just think that it’s just a character that I love, and I think that there are things that we learn that make it very sad, things that are already sad, get sadder, and some things get cheapened.
ES: I liked the ending of the book. She has a very specific way of writing endings where the character really metamorphosizes right in front of your eyes. And really, I think all of her characters at the end of their books were fucking crazy. It very much reminded me of Katniss after the explosion in “Mockingjay” that kills Prim, and Snow in the forest in District 12 had that same spiral that, although the voice is different, was very similar.
MI: I liked the ending and I liked the repetition of the poem. I didn’t listen to the audio book, but I heard that the poem kept speeding up throughout to show his spiral. And I feel like that really began to show how he started to go into his like descent.
CR: On paper I do like the idea of the crash out. I think it’s something she’s done well before and I think it’s something that I can appreciate, but ultimately, I don’t know if I felt it was earned, but I also felt that way about Snow’s book. So, I think I need to wonder if I’m just not a Suzanne Collins person anymore, and maybe that’s okay.
Managing Arts Editor Camille Nagy, Senior Arts Editor Cora Rolfes and Daily Arts Writers Estlin Salah and Meagan Ismail can be reached at camnagy@umich.edu, corolfes@umich.edu, essalah@umich.edu, and mismai@umich.edu, respectively.
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