Haymitch's Games
This is the prequel Collins was always going to write eventually: the story of Haymitch Abernathy, the drunk mentor from District 12 who readers of the original trilogy know as someone broken by something that happened long before Katniss came along. Sunrise on the Reaping is the story of what broke him.
Set during the 50th Hunger Games, the Second Quarter Quell, where the Capitol doubled the tribute count, it follows a teenage Haymitch from the reaping through the arena. If you've read the originals, you know he survives. What Collins does is make the survival feel like a punishment rather than a prize.
Darker than expected
I expected this to feel like familiar Hunger Games territory. It doesn't. The tone is heavier and more unrelenting than even the original trilogy. Collins isn't writing for the same audience she was in 2008: this book doesn't soften its edges. The arena sequences are brutal in ways that feel deliberate rather than gratuitous, and the ending doesn't offer the small mercies the original trilogy eventually did.
Knowing the destination makes the journey worse, not better. You spend the whole book dreading something the characters can't see coming.
That dramatic irony is used well. As a reader who knows what Haymitch eventually becomes, isolated, self-destructive, barely functional, watching him in this book as someone who starts out with warmth and connection and hope is genuinely affecting.
What it adds to the world
The best thing about the Hunger Games prequels is that Collins keeps using them to examine different aspects of how totalitarian systems maintain power. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was about the ideology: how someone becomes an architect of oppression. This one is about the human cost at the other end: what the machine does to the people it processes.
It also deepens the Second Quarter Quell in a way that adds weight to references in the original trilogy. The Capitol's cruelty in the arena isn't incidental: it's pointed, and Collins makes sure you feel exactly why.
Should you read it?
If you've read the original trilogy, yes, absolutely. If you haven't read any Hunger Games, start there. This isn't an entry point: it's a coda that only lands with full context. But for anyone who grew up with Panem and has wondered what made Haymitch what he is, this book provides the answer in the most painful way possible. Collins at her best.