'Sunrise' arrives at midnight for fans celebrating release of new
'Hunger Games' novel
[March 19, 2025]
By HILLEL ITALIE
NEW YORK (AP) — Savannah Miller, 26 years old and a “Hunger Games”
reader for half of her life, has only grown in admiration for Suzanne
Collins’ dystopian novels.
“As a kid you focus so much on the plot and the action,” says Miller, a
researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and among hundreds
of fans at the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan's Union Square who attended
the midnight launch party for “Sunrise on the Reaping,” published
Tuesday. “As an adult I connected to the characters a lot more and had
more of an emotional response. I also appreciated the writing a lot.”
“Hunger Games” fans gathered in bookstores around the world for
celebrations of Collins fifth novel in her blockbuster series about a
post-apocalyptic society in which combatants are forced to fight on
camera for their survival. Attendees in New York — some dressed as
Haymitch Abernathy, Effie Trinket and other characters — went on
scavenger hunts, attempted to solve “Hunger Games”-themed puzzles and
tried out a “Hunger Games” trivia game so challenging that even Collins'
editor, David Levithan, said he couldn't answer them all.
Fans who fell in love with series as children continue attachment
Many arrivals Monday night were women in their 20s and 30s who had loved
the books in middle school and renewed their attachment when Collins
unexpectedly resumed the novels five years ago.
“I've been reading the books since I was 12," says 23-year-old actor
Ella Dolynchuk. “It's a big part of my life, my childhood, and I love
reading them as an adult when I can really understand them."
“Sunrise on the Reaping” had already reached No. 1 on Amazon before its
publication and is widely expected to be one of the year's biggest
fiction sellers. Although the book was embargoed before its official
sales date, gleeful fans were posting videos on social media in recent
days that showed off advanced copies apparently shipped too early or
prematurely placed on shelves, including at Los Angeles Airport, a Sam's
Club in California and an Indigo bookstore in Canada.
According to Scholastic Inc., the four previous books have sold tens of
millions of copies and have been published in 55 languages. Film
adaptations helped launch the career of Jennifer Lawrence, who starred
as the heroine Katniss Everdeen in the movies based on the first three
books, and have grossed more than $3 billion worldwide. A screen version
of “Sunrise on the Reaping” is scheduled for November 2026, with Francis
Lawrence returning as director.
Collins had planned to end the series after the third book, “Mockingjay,”
which came out in 2010. But she startled readers and the publishing
world by announcing a decade later that she was working on a fourth
volume, the prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes." Levithan was
among those who had not suspected that Collins was returning to the
ravaged land of Panem.
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Fans appear at a midnight launch party for "Sunrise on the Reaping"
by Suzanne Collins at Barnes & Noble bookstore in New York on
Tuesday, March 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Hillel Italie)
 “She decides and then she springs it
on me,” Levithan said Monday night at the Barnes & Noble launch. “We
had never talked about prequels. The trilogy was the trilogy, and
then she realized she had more to say.”
‘Sunrise’ takes place 24 years before first novel
The new book begins at sunrise, with the reaping of the Fiftieth
Hunger Games. It's set 24 years before the original “Hunger Games”
novel, which came out in 2008, and 40 years after “Songbirds and
Snakes.” Collins has drawn upon Greek mythology and the Roman
gladiator games for her earlier books. For “Sunrise on the Reaping,”
her muses included the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David
Hume.
“With ‘Sunrise on the Reaping,’ I was inspired by David Hume’s idea
of implicit submission and, in his words, ‘the easiness with which
the many are governed by the few,‘” Collins, who did not attend the
Barnes & Noble event and rarely gives interviews, said in a
statement released when the new book was announced. “The story also
lent itself to a deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the
power of those who control the narrative. The question ‘Real or not
real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”
“Sunrise” centers on a teenage Haymitch, who will age into Katniss'
sardonic, alcoholic mentor, and includes references to various other
characters and subplots in previous books. New York Times reviewer
Jennifer Harlan on Tuesday called the novel a “propulsive,
heart-wrenching addition” to the series that adds ”welcome texture
to the cruel world of Panem." People magazine's Lizz Schumer noted
some passages could be seen as references to current events,
including “If you can get people to laugh at someone, it makes them
look weak.”
On Monday, lines began to form four hours before the store's doors
opened: 34-year-old Elizabeth Kelly was among the first to arrive.
She thinks of the series as her “comfort books,” while also calling
them “survival stories that feel more and more relevant."
“It takes a lot of imagination to expand a world and say something
new every time,” she said. “I feel like she's writing the books to
tell us something and not just writing books to make money.”
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