Review – Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

When I pulled this one up on my Kindle app because I read books on my phone or ipad or pc, it was already at 99%, indicating I already read it. So I looked up the summary in Wikipedia – oh yeah, the one with Haymitch, where they quote The Raven a lot. It’s a tragedy, as one might guess from the way Haymitch turned into the cynical drunk who mentored Katniss in Hunger Games. 

I’m not going to re-read it, and I’ll note that I got all the way through it at least once. The summary refreshed my memory a little – it’s a Hunger Games story, about a crawler who goes into the dungeon to kill kill kill – oops, wait, that’s from Dungeon Crawler Carl, the latest and freshest in the Deadly Games genre. 

A genre I tend to enjoy. The Long Walk. Squid Games. Jumanji. A good gamer story is nearly as good as playing an actual game, and at this phase of my life, it’s a toss-up as to whether I’ve spent more time reading books or playing games. 

I think Carl is currently doing a bangup job with the “gamers united against the game masters” theme, which is kind of a weak subtext in the Hunger Games series, where people are too demoralized and brutalized to get organized and throw a revolution. 

I might have mentioned it before, but these days I have a special dislike for “this is how you beat fascism” stories. Bad plan. Didn’t work. Try something else.

 Sunrise has an even worse premise: this is how fascism happens despite your best efforts – maybe it’s because you’re just a tragic guy destined to lead a fucked-up life with an unhappy ending. Born to lose. Hero of a story about “what horrible things could have happened to this man to turn him into a total lush?” The answer unfolds, detailing all his stressors. Then there’s an especially unhappy moment. Then the hero wanders off to get blackout drunk and our participation in his story mercifully ends. Leaving us staring bleakly at Ms. Collins’ latest depressive episode. 

This one’s kind of the standard by which I’ll judge the others, since I already read and forgot it once. Not great, not terrible, compelling enough to finish but sad enough to ask yourself why.