Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping Gives Update on Katniss & Peeta

Yahoo

25-03-2025

Originally appeared on E! Online
Warning: Spoilers for Sunrise on the Reaping below.
For Hunger Games fans looking for an update on Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, the odds are ever in their favor.
Because while Sunrise on the Reaping is set more than 25 years before the Katniss and Peeta lead a revolution—instead following their mentor Haymitch Abernathy during the second Quarter Quell—author Suzanne Collins still gives a glimpse at what the couple's life looks like in the epilogue, as they find their new normal following the events of the original book trilogy.
Over the course of nearly 400 pages in the prequel, Collins painstakingly lays out the horrors Haymitch endures, from becoming a tribute on his 16th birthday to the slaughter that follows. But the final monstrosity that Snow bestows upon him after he defies the odds and wins the Games is that he returns home just in time to be met with the shocking deaths of his family and girlfriend Lenore Dove.
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But while it's the loss of his girlfriend that serves as the final blow that leads him to his drunken fate, Collins doesn't end on a bleak note. Instead, she offers a look into his future—one we've previously seen in Mockingjay: A life with Katniss and Peeta as his makeshift family.
Indeed, in the short epilogue, Collins returns to a post-revolution District 12. And, in it, she not only offers up a glimpse at how Katniss and Peeta's life together, but how despite his best efforts, Haymitch finally lets them all the way in, recounting life with his brother Sid and BFF Burdock Everdeen (who happens to be Katniss' dad), as well as his surprising bond in the arena with District 12 mean girl Maysilee Donner.
'I didn't want to have anything to do with their memorial book after the war,' Haymitch insists in the epilogue. 'What use? What point? To relive all the loss. But when Burdock's page came up, I had to mention him showing me the grave. And I felt compelled to tell then about Maysilee Donner, former owner of the mockingjay pin. And how Sid loved the stars.'
After Katniss and Peeta learn about Lenora Dove—how she cared for geese and that it was Katniss' late dad Burdock who helped Haymitch find her hidden grave—the young pair spring into action.
And in giving their former mentor his own flock of geese to look after, Katniss and Peeta give a piece of Haymitch's life with Lenora Dove back to him. 'Like the geese,' Haymitch says, 'we really did mate for life.'
Ultimately, Haymitch gains the clarity to realize the parallels between himself and Katniss: their stubborn disposition, the way their grief after losing nearly everyone manifested and how she finally achieved what he could not in leading a revolution.
'She's not an easy person; she's like me, Peeta always says. But she was smarter than me, or luckier,' Haymitch admits, adding that when it comes to the reaping, 'She's the one who kept that sun from rising.'
Keep reading to learn more secrets from The Hunger Games…
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