By Miriam R. Kramer

The Hunger Games trilogy comprising The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay have become part of popular culture due to their fast-paced action and thoughtful questions about surviving in an alternative, siloed, and totalitarian version of the United States. As bestselling dystopian novels and high-grossing films, they have made a global impact. The first prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, showed the teenage viewpoint of Coriolanus Snow, the President of Panem, when he was assigned as a mentor at the Games. The recently released prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, tells the story of Haymitch Abernathy, an important side character and mentor in the initial trilogy, and how he went from a normal inhabitant of District 12 to a games contestant who rebels without realizing the price he might pay if he becomes the victor.

The totalitarian government of Panem, this future United States, sends children representing all twelve districts to the Capitol, site of their non-representative government, to fight to the death in an arena every year until all but one are dead. Those winners are crowned victors of the Hunger Games, a gruesome annual reality show watched by all citizens and treated as entertainment by the privileged, frivolous upper class in the Capitol.

Suzanne Collins focuses primarily on the characters picked for the Games from the segregated District 12, a thinly veiled version of Appalachia, in all of her novels. It is considered the poorest district: one where people do what they can to make ends meet and get enough food to fend off starvation.

In The Hunger Games, Peeta Malark is chosen as the boy and Katniss Everdeen volunteers to replace her sister, Primrose, in the first series. They are assigned the drunk, dissolute Haymitch as their mentor 24 years after he won the Hunger Games. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes centers the relationship between the young Coriolanus Snow, an ambitious student assigned to mentor the female candidate from District 12, Lucy Grey Baird, a member of a singing gypsy folk group called the Covey. Sunrise on the Reaping tells Haymitch’s story in a Hunger Games taking place forty years later, as he suffers the rigors of navigating the Games with the goal of standing up to the Capitol with other unwilling participants.

Haymitch begins his story as a contented teen with a girlfriend who is also from the Covey, Lenore Dove, a woman he adores for her spirit and beauty. He loves his mother, brother, and friends, and brews bootleg liquor in the woods outside District 12, making enough money to help his mother make ends meet. When he is chosen to replace a boy picked for the Hunger Games, he is in shock at the idea of his almost certain imminent demise.

When Haymitch and his fellow District 12 tributes arrive in the Capitol, they mix with tributes from other districts and figure out who they might and cannot trust. In the process, Haymitch gains a plan, with the help of his mentors, to throw a monkey wrench into the Hunger Games operation and stand up for the masses, who should by all rights be able to overthrow the few and the authoritarian who rule them.

I have read The Hunger Games Trilogy several times and seen the movies as well. I ended up loving The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes for its view of President Coriolanus Snow when he was young, poor, ambitious and resourceful, at the fulcrum of choosing power or love. The movie, which few saw, was even better, with a different, introspective feel to it than the original trilogy but all of the advantages of wonderful cinematography and animation, a fast-moving action-adventure plot and a mesmerizing ambiguity at the end. I recommend it highly. Suzanne Collins starts to expand on her ideas about power and governments and political philosophy, but not in an unapproachable way. Since this book is accessible to both young adults and their parents, it is useful as a starting point for a discussion.

Sunrise on the Reaping fills out Haymitch’s backstory to see how he went from a fairly happy-go-lucky teen to the dissolute, angry, and despairing creature Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark meet first in The Hunger Games. His love for Lenore Dove, a rebellious and beautiful musical member of the Covey, becomes mystical as he goes through trials in the arena, with Lenore a shining figure whose welfare is never far from his mind. Named after the elusive maiden Lenore in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Nevermore,” snatches of the macabre poem flash through his mind as he follows his courageous path in standing up to President Snow.

The novel reveals that as a result of his past, Snow may have his own bitter reason for a particular vendetta against District 12 participants, one that will affect Haymitch no matter what he does. The Poe poem elevates the novel in its Gothic style and haunting repetition, which echoes through Haymitch’s traumatized mind as he worries about his lady love. As verses echo one another, they slide about in Haymitch’s consciousness, representing the past, future, or just a dream. “Nevermore” is a poem that crosses from Panem to our world. It asks us to ponder what Poe meant about human love, grief, and the imagination of loss.

Suzanne Collins inserts poems as songs and songs as poems from her first Hunger Games novel onwards. “Meet Me at the Hanging Tree,” a song for which she wrote the lyrics in that book, adds a poignant touch that increases the novel’s depth and meaning. The music added to it in the film made it even more beautiful. She has a talent for penning poems inside novels, in addition to dubbing characters with surreal, slightly askew names that reflect their district backgrounds. I thought of J.K. Rowling, who shows a similar skill in naming her Harry Potter characters with a mixture of influences from our Muggle world and the magical one.

Suzanne Collins has penned a moving tale of Panem before the advent of Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, continuing to explore the nature of authoritarian regimes in which the few govern and instill fear that subjugates and subdues the masses, who eventually must come together to destroy their power. This idea even makes its way into the arena when the less trained tributes become allies, fighting more powerful district groups made up of cruel, bullying, and well-trained members. Collins poses revolution as an idea that flickers and grows, one that needs just the right combination of circumstances to catch fire.

She seems to have developed as a writer over time in exploring the ideas of power for power’s sake versus love in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. In Sunrise on the Reaping, she examines Panem’s propaganda and lies through Haymitch’s perspective, in which he can see that at least part of the population will believe they indicate the right way to live. This novel shows that the struggle against authoritarian rule has its price, and that it can also become part of a longer journey to victory with many sacrifices along the way. Hunger Games fans should read it along with reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and watching that screen adaptation. This last prequel will probably also be filmed, and one can only hope that it lives up to the previous movies in the Hunger Games universe.