The Hunger Games, maybe one of the most popular book and movie series of all time. The book series now has 5 books in the full series. With the most recent book being book 0.5 in the series, called Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. In this book, we follow Haymitch Abernathy (who in the earlier books is a mentor to later tributes of the 74th games, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark) in District 12 for the 50th games, where twice as many tributes will be selected, as Hamich tries not to think so much about his chances but as him name is called he can feel all he’s ever wanted shatter, as only one tribute has ever won the games from District 12. As he’s shuttled to the Capital, he feels a need to show who he is, and destroy the Capital for once.

As soon as this book was announced, I was extremely excited because I have been a huge fan of this series for a long time, and that was quickly escalated with the announcement of the movie adaptation coming out on November 20, 2026. The beginning of this novel was great. There’s always so much going on in every Hunger Games novel, like the capital controlling everyone and all of the propaganda involved in Panem. The character development in Haymitch was pretty great. At the beginning of the novel, he is just a normal District 12 person going about their day, but through the novel, he slowly turns into a rebel who wants to destroy the Capitol for good.

One part of this novel that I really enjoyed was all of the cameos from other characters from the previous novels, like Beetee and Plutarch. I thought that was a good addition and had me typing into Google “Who is ___ from The Hunger Games?” Overall I thought this novel was great, I thought Sunrise on the Reaping added a lot to this already amazing series, and Suzanne Collins is an amazing author.