I've been a little scared of this movie. Sunrise on the Reaping gutted me when I read it, and it hits theaters November 20. My oldest is a big Hunger Games fan, so we're going together. We can't wait. I'm also slightly terrified.

So here's the refresher before we all walk into that theater. All 27 chapters and the Epilogue, what happens in each one, and the small details Suzanne Collins plants early so they can hurt you later.

⚠️ MAJOR SPOILER WARNING: Full spoilers for Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins, including how the Games end, who survives, and the final chapters.

Haven't read it yet? Stop here and head to my spoiler-free review of Sunrise on the Reaping instead. Come back when you've finished and you need someone to talk to.

How Sunrise on the Reaping Is Structured (And the Argument You Probably Missed)

The book runs 27 chapters across three parts, then closes on an Epilogue. Each part is named for the role Haymitch is playing.

  • Part 1, The Birthday (Chapters 1 to 9): the reaping, the train, the parade, and Haymitch's first meeting with President Snow.
  • Part 2, The Rascal (Chapters 10 to 18): the sabotage plan, the interviews, and the first days in the arena.
  • Part 3, The Poster (Chapters 19 to 27): the end of the Games and everything Snow takes afterward.
  • The Epilogue: an older Haymitch, after Mockingjay. Yes, that's how the book spells it.

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Where to Buy Sunrise on the Reaping

If you need your own copy before the movie, here's where to find it.

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins book cover

📖 Buy on Amazon | Buy on Bookshop.org | 🎧 Listen on Audible

The audiobook is worth knowing about. Jefferson White narrates it, and it won Audiobook of the Year at the 2026 Audies.

How to Read Alongside This Guide

If you're reading along, finish a chapter, check in here, and go back to the book. Try not to run ahead. Collins plays fair with you, but the payoffs land harder when you get to them on her schedule.

If you've already finished and you just want a refresher before the movie, read this straight through. It takes a fraction of the time, and you'll walk in knowing exactly what's coming. Bring tissues anyway.

Quick Navigation

Part 1: The Birthday, Chapters 1 to 9

Part 1 moves fast. Haymitch wakes up an ordinary kid from District 12 and ends these nine chapters with Snow's personal attention, a dead friend, and a stranger wearing her name.

Chapter 1: The Birthday Reaping

Haymitch Abernathy wakes up on his sixteenth birthday, which is also reaping day. This year is the Second Quarter Quell, so every district sends four tributes instead of two. He lives in District 12 with his widowed mother and his ten year old brother, Sid. He helps support them by working for Hattie Meeney, who makes illegal white liquor. He doesn't drink it himself.

He slips under the fence to meet his girlfriend, Lenore Dove, in the meadow where she keeps her geese. She gives him a flint striker with a snake and a bird on it. Then he buys her a bag of gumdrops at the Donner sweet shop and heads to the square. The names are Louella McCoy, Maysilee Donner, Wyatt Callow and Woodbine Chance. Woodbine runs, and a Peacekeeper shoots him.

Watch for: sober Haymitch. If you know him from the original books, that detail should worry you.

Chapter 2: The Replacement Tribute

The cameras cut immediately, and Haymitch realizes the live broadcast has never been live. There's a five minute delay so the Capitol can fix whatever goes wrong. In the chaos, Lenore Dove fights to get Woodbine's body back. Haymitch jumps in to protect her and takes the blow himself. Drusilla Sickle, the Capitol escort, decides that's her replacement.

They reshoot the reaping with Haymitch's name in it. A cameraman named Plutarch Heavensbee then offers his family a few minutes with him, if they'll perform their grief for the camera. Haymitch shuts it down, gives Sid the gumdrops for Lenore, and gets carried onto the train in handcuffs. The last thing he sees is Lenore on a ridge, wailing, wrecking any footage they could use.

Remember those gumdrops. Collins certainly does.

Chapter 3: The Train to the Capitol

Haymitch thinks about Lenore's family. She's descended from the Covey, the traveling musicians the Capitol broke up after the rebellion. Then Plutarch moves him in with the others. He takes Louella's hand, calls her sweetheart as a joke from when they were little, and asks her to be his ally. Maysilee, who's wearing six necklaces, makes the Capitol attendant bring plates and silverware because she refuses to be fed like an animal.

They watch the reaping recap on TV. Woodbine is gone. So is the riot. Haymitch's family cries on cue, and Plutarch tells him he did them a favor. Then an attendant walks in with a birthday cake.

Chapter 4: The Birthday Cake

Haymitch knows the cake is a shot they want for TV. He remembers what his father told Sarshee Whitcomb, a District 12 tribute from years earlier. Don't let them use you. Don't let them make their posters out of your blood. So he walks to the window and ignores it.

When Drusilla sneers at Louella's dress, Maysilee mocks her right back, and the two of them end up trading slaps. Drusilla goes after her with a riding crop until Plutarch steps in. That night, Haymitch remembers the gold pin Maysilee was given for her thirteenth birthday. A mockingjay. She hated it. By morning Wyatt has proved he overheard Louella calling his family gamblers, and he's listing every District 1 tribute's odds from memory.

Yes, that pin. It'll reach Katniss by way of Maysilee's family, decades later.

Chapter 5: The Tribute Parade

Wyatt clears things up. He's an oddsmaker, not a bookie, and he wants the record to show it. The Capitol station is covered in slogans, and Haymitch notices something strange. The Capitol has to sell the Games to its own people too. At the Tribute Center, he names the flint striker as his token and hopes nobody works out what it does.

District 12 gets the leftovers: two student prep artists, Proserpina and Vitus, and a lazy stylist named Magno Stift. Their chariot gets skittish horses. During the parade a firework goes off, the horses bolt, and District 12 slams into District 6. Haymitch comes to and finds Louella dead on the ground.

Chapter 6: Louella Under the Balcony

Maysilee fastens one of her necklaces around Louella's neck. Haymitch picks Louella up and runs, takes an empty chariot, and drives her straight under President Snow's balcony. He lays her down and points the whole thing at Snow in front of the crowd. It's the first poster he paints himself.

Afterward, a young District 3 tribute named Ampert invites him into an anti-Career alliance, and he says no. His ally days ended with Louella. Then District 12 meets its mentors, because the district has no living victors to send. Wiress is brilliant and hard to read. Mags, an older victor from District 4, tells him she's sorry about Louella, and he finally breaks down in her arms.

You've met Mags before, as Finnick's elderly mentor in Catching Fire. Knowing she held Haymitch here makes that arena even harder to revisit.

Chapter 7: The Knives in the Training Room

The soup at dinner is the bean and ham hock his mother makes when things are bad. In the morning, Mags and Wiress ask the tributes what they want from the Games. Wyatt wants to go quickly. Maysilee wants her pride intact. Haymitch wants to make the Capitol own what it's doing, and he picks his words carefully for the cameras.

In training, District 12 teams up with District 7 at the knife station. Panache, a huge District 1 tribute, punches Haymitch in the chest, and the tributes grab the fallen knives. For a second they're armed, and they outnumber the Peacekeepers. Then a trainer holds out a basket, and everyone hands the knives back.

Nobody tells them to surrender. They just do. Plutarch asks Haymitch the question the whole book is built on: why didn't you?

Chapter 8: The Newcomers

Plutarch keeps pushing. Why does anybody go along with it? Haymitch thinks he's being mocked. He also learns the crash and his stunt with Louella were cut from the broadcast. Then Ampert sends him to talk to his father, Beetee, a past victor from District 3. Ampert was reaped as punishment for Beetee's sabotage, and now Beetee has to coach his own son. He tells Haymitch the arena is a machine, and machines can break.

At lunch, the anti-Career districts gather together, and Haymitch gives his food to the starving District 6 tributes. They name themselves the Newcomers. Maysilee quietly starts turning everyone's keepsakes into tokens. When Ampert says he wishes she were his sister, she tells him she'll be his sister.

Chapter 9: Snow in the Conservatory

Plutarch takes Haymitch to the Heavensbee mansion, which is staffed by Avoxes, servants whose tongues the Capitol has removed. In the library, Haymitch spots a bottle labeled nepenthe and recognizes it from "The Raven," Lenore's name poem. He finds Snow in the conservatory, sick and vomiting into a fountain. Haymitch is sent for milk. He drinks it himself and comes back with an empty pitcher.

Snow makes it clear he's just poisoned the parade master. He asks a little too much about Lenore and the Covey. Then he lays out the deal. Haymitch will die in the arena no matter what, but if he dies clean, his family and Lenore get to live. The conversation ends with a gift: Louella McCoy, alive, walking through the door.

Except it isn't Louella. And keep your eye on that milk.

Part 2: The Rascal, Chapters 10 to 18

This is where the book turns into a heist, and you know before you start that it fails. Haymitch wins these Games. That's the cruelty of a prequel. You spend Part 2 hoping anyway.

Chapter 10: Lou Lou

Haymitch knows immediately that she's a double. She can only repeat Louella's name and district. The Capitol is drugging her through a port in her chest and feeding her instructions through an earpiece, and she's in terrible shape. When she picks a seeded roll from District 11's bread, the group works out where she's from. They call her Lou Lou and agree to be kind to her.

That night Wiress cuts the apartment's power so Beetee can talk. He explains Sub-A, the hidden level under the arena where the Gamemakers work. The arena's computer lives down there. Pulling the plug won't work, because there's a backup generator outside the arena. So he's going to drown it.

Chapter 11: The Lowest Score in Panem

Sub-A holds a huge reservoir under the northern end of the arena. If Haymitch can get down through one of the mutt hatches and blow it open, the water takes out the computer. Beetee's bombs need deliberate assembly and a flame. Ampert will help. Haymitch offers to go alone, and Beetee tells him the Capitol won't let Ampert live either way. All he asks is that it be quick.

Wiress discovers Lou Lou's earpiece listens too, which reminds Haymitch of the old jabberjays. The Newcomers add Districts 11 and 9. In his private session, Haymitch plays a selfish punk who just wants to win. The Gamemakers give him a one, the lowest possible score.

Chapter 12: Learning to Be a Rascal

Maysilee and Mags tell him a one isn't the worst thing. At least people will remember it. Then Haymitch asks Maysilee about the mockingjay pin, and she says she knows a secret about Lenore Dove. Ask her about the orange paint on her fingernails.

Drusilla coaches the tributes for their interviews. When she shakes Lou Lou, the girl screams that they're being murdered. Drusilla raises a hand, then notices how many tributes are watching. She tells Haymitch to play a harmless rascal. Then Proserpina and Vitus rush in. Magno has made himself dangerously ill on toad venom, and nobody has clothes for the show. Proserpina calls her sister.

Her sister is a young woman with lavender hair and a cart of spiky shoes. Effie Trinket has entered the chat.

Chapter 13: The Interviews

Effie brings a load of clothes inherited from her great aunt and uncle, and she tells them they deserve to look beautiful tonight. Haymitch picks a vest covered in cocktail glasses. Backstage, Beetee tells him to go north as soon as the Games start and follow the mutts to find a hatch. He's also swapped District 9's sunflower tokens for explosives without telling them. Ampert will collect the tokens after they die.

Read that again. Beetee is planning around the deaths of kids who joined his son's alliance. Haymitch warns Wellie, a small tribute from District 6, to stay away from him for her own good. Onstage, Lou Lou bares her teeth at the audience and collapses when the Capitol drugs her. Haymitch charms the crowd with his white liquor stories. Then Plutarch takes him aside, hands him a phone, and it's Lenore Dove.

That's how you buy trust from a boy with nothing left to lose.

Chapter 14: The Phone Call

Lenore Dove has been arrested. After the reaping, she went back to the stage and sang the songs the Capitol bans, and a crowd gathered around her. The charge is small, and she thinks she'll get out. They say I love you, and the line goes dead.

Plutarch explains why he did it. He needs Haymitch to trust what comes next. The arena's sun rises in the east, so he can find north, and the mutt hatches are hidden under flowering berms. He tells Haymitch not to let them control the story. Back in the library, the tributes film mocking clips about the Careers and call them Near Beer. Then Haymitch lies in bed with "The Raven" going through his head.

The Newcomers are funny here. Enjoy it. This is the last time anybody laughs for a while.

Chapter 15: The Most Beautiful Arena

Mags hugs them goodbye, and a hovercraft carries them to the arena. Effie sees Haymitch off. Then he rises into a gorgeous green meadow with a forest on one side and a snowy mountain on the other. He uses the sun to find north, grabs a pack, a knife and a spear, and sprints for the trees.

The cannons fire eighteen times, then twice more. Twenty dead on the first morning, and he knows some of them have to be Newcomers. His pack holds food, water, a hammock, binoculars and charcoal tablets. He stops at a stream to drink, and he's watching a rabbit do the same when it falls over dead.

Watch for: the charcoal. It seems like the most disappointing thing in the pack.

Chapter 16: Everything Here Is Poison

Everything in the arena is poisoned, including what he just drank. The charcoal saves him. He hides until nightfall, when the dead are projected on the sky. Sixteen Newcomers are gone, including all of District 9. The last face is Wyatt's, and it hits him harder than he expected. He decides the Games have to end.

In the morning, Lou Lou finds him, chanting his name. He walks her north. She's drawn to a berm of purple flowers he knows as bee balm, a healing plant at home. She breathes in deeply and starts to choke on the pollen. The Gamemakers could end it instantly through her pump. They don't. So Haymitch tears the pump off her chest himself.

Chapter 17: The Butterfly Berm

Haymitch whispers an accusation into Lou Lou's earpiece, then carries her body away from the hovercraft so the Capitol can't have her. His punishment arrives as blue butterflies that shock him. He uses his flint striker to ignite a berm of gas plant and burns the swarm. Then he follows the survivors to a Butterfly Bush berm, where a hatch is sliding shut, and jams it open with a stick.

Sponsors send bread, cheese, grape juice and wine glasses. He toasts his fellow rascals in the Capitol. Ampert finds him with two sunflower pendants, and they stage a conversation for the cameras. Ampert also brings Wyatt's token. Wyatt, it turns out, died protecting Lou Lou.

Chapter 18: The Reservoir

Around midnight, Haymitch climbs down into Sub-A, finds the reservoir wall, builds the bomb and lights the fuse. It blows. Water pours through the tunnels and he fights his way up the ladder. Ampert is gone.

Haymitch follows a chittering sound into the woods and finds squirrel mutts swarming Ampert. They don't touch Haymitch. They're programmed for one boy, and Beetee is watching. Haymitch takes Ampert's ax and rages, and an earthquake answers him. Then the arena starts to glitch. Trees spark. Deer mutts stagger around. Haymitch dances and sings the banned goose song, sure he's done it. Then the sky hums back to life and the mountain erupts.

Beetee asked for quick. Snow heard him.

Part 3: The Poster, Chapters 19 to 27

You already know Haymitch comes home. Collins knows you know. Part 3 is about what that actually costs.

Chapter 19: The Failed Plan

The plan didn't work. Haymitch cries at the base of a tree and wonders who he thought he was, a sixteen year old from the poorest district in Panem. At dawn he can still hear a hum, and he realizes it's the backup generator. He has one explosive left, so he has one more target.

He heads north and loses hours in a dense V-shaped hedge until a rabbit leads him out. The Careers are waiting. He kills two of them before Panache gets him on the ground and raises a sword. Then a blowdart hits Panache in the throat.

He turns around, and it's the girl he spent the first chapter calling stuck up.

Chapter 20: Maysilee Comes Back

Maysilee is holding a blowgun attached to one of her braided necklaces. She bandages him up, they split his food, and they agree to stick together. The count in the sky shows eight Newcomers and two Careers left. A parachute delivers a pot of bean and ham hock soup. It's the soup from his first dinner with Mags, so you don't have to guess who sent it.

Haymitch asks if she remembers what Ampert asked her, back when she made his token. She tells him she'll be his sister. In the morning they start cutting through the hedge, and swarms of bloodsucking ladybug mutts pour out onto them.

Mags has known him for about a week. That pot of soup is a love letter.

Chapter 21: Blood Kin

They run screaming and rip the bugs off. Maysilee says they're blood kin now, and she quietly wonders whether Merrilee will still be a twin once she's gone. Haymitch thinks about what the Games do to a district long after the cameras leave. It washes out in rings, through families and neighbors, for years.

They find three Newcomers poisoned by porcupine mutts and can't save them. Then Ringina and Autumn are gone too. Five tributes remain. Maysilee says if one of them wins, that person has to be the worst victor in history. That night she sings a nursery song about a ladybug whose house is on fire, and it gives Haymitch his idea for the hedge.

The worst victor in history. There's the man Katniss meets on the train, and he's sixteen.

Chapter 22: The Gamemakers in the Clearing

Maysilee sets out a sponsor breakfast like an elegant picnic and calls it a poster. We're civilized, it says. We're as good as you. On the way back to the hedge, Silka and Maritte, the last two Careers, attack them. The fight spills into a clearing where three young Gamemakers are working at an open hatch. They order the tributes to back off.

Maysilee looks at her blowgun. Maritte's trident kills one Gamemaker. Maysilee's dart kills the second. The third falls through the hatch. A hovercraft drops tear gas, and when it's over, Maysilee demands to know why Haymitch just stood there. He has no answer. He's been trained his whole life not to touch them. They burn a path through the hedge and reach the edge of the world: a sheer cliff, with the generator far below on the rocks.

Notice who did it. A rich girl from 12 and a Career from 4. That's the alliance the Capitol built the whole system to prevent.

Chapter 23: Maysilee's Last Stand

Haymitch decides that if he can't reach the generator, he'll at least die outside the arena. He says goodbye to Maysilee, and she walks back into the hedge. He tosses a pebble over the cliff and it bounces back. The generator is protected by a force field. Then he hears her scream.

He gets there too late. Knife-beaked waterbird mutts are on her, and one pierces her throat. He holds her hand. She doesn't beg. She dies exactly the way she said she wanted to, with her pride intact. He takes one of her necklaces and the blowgun. That night he finds Wellie starving in a tree and feeds her. When he hears Silka crying below, he drops down a few of the chocolates.

Maritte is in the sky that night too, and that's no coincidence. The Capitol doesn't forgive touching one of its own.

Chapter 24: The Milk

Black pigment on his fingers tells Haymitch the necklace is one of Beetee's explosives. He has one more shot, and he picks the Cornucopia. He hides Wellie in the grapevines to look for firewood, and a parachute lands with a pitcher of milk, courtesy of the Capitol. If it's poisoned and he gives it to Wellie, he kills her on camera. If he pours it out, he looks like he's starving her. So he's going to drink it himself. Then the cannon fires.

He runs back. Silka has killed Wellie. It's the image director Francis Lawrence has said can't go in a PG-13 movie. Haymitch tries to take Silka down so the Games have no victor, and they tear each other apart. He runs for the cliff with his stomach cut open. She throws her ax, he collapses, and it bounces off the force field and kills her. He throws the last bomb over the edge anyway.

He believes he's dying. He's happy about it. That's the last time this book lets him be happy for decades.

Chapter 25: The Victor

Haymitch wakes up shackled to a bed in a glass room, with a stitched stomach and Avoxes pleading with him silently. A rabbit like the one from the hedge appears, then a snake swallows it. He picks fights with the nurses just to get sedated. Then he wakes up alone in the tribute apartment with a pump in his chest, just like Lou Lou's. The TV starts playing old Games clips, including a girl in a rainbow dress singing to a young man in the crowd.

That's Lucy Gray Baird, District 12's forgotten victor, and Haymitch suspects the young man is Snow. Effie gets him ready for the Victor's Ceremony. Wiress and Mags have clearly been punished. The official recap cuts every act of solidarity, makes him look selfish, and erases the final bomb. Snow crowns him and tells him to enjoy his homecoming.

Chapter 26: The Homecoming

The Capitol hangs Haymitch in a golden birdcage at his own afterparty and hand feeds him. He takes all of it, hoping that will keep his people safe. Then he rides home with the coffins. Nobody is at the station. There's a glow in the distance. It's his house, burning with his mother and Sid inside.

District 12 buries its dead together. Wyatt's father doesn't survive the news. Haymitch can't bear the McCoys' questions, so he waits in the dark for Lenore Dove, who's been released. He means to leave her alone forever, for her own safety.

Then she's there, spinning with a bag of gumdrops, and he can't do it. She is so excited she can't stop shaking so he takes the bag to help her. He feeds her two. She says now she can eat the others Sid gave her, the ones under her pillow. He looks into the bag. Every gumdrop is blood red.

The candy he bought for her on the first morning is under her pillow. This bag came from Snow, and Snow made sure Haymitch would be the one to hand it to her. She dies in his arms, asking him not to let the sun rise on the reaping.

This is the page. If you know, you know.

Chapter 27: Nevermore

The whole of "The Raven" runs through this chapter, stanza by stanza, as Haymitch falls apart. Every night he relives feeding her that candy. Burdock and Asterid keep showing up at the Victor's Village until he throws rocks at them and hits Asterid. Now he's truly alone. He starts buying liquor in the Seam. He finds Lenore's grave in a hidden Covey cemetery, near the name Lucy Gray, and he buries the flint striker there.

One morning he wakes in an alley under spray-painted anti-Capitol slogans. He thinks of the orange paint, and he finally understands Maysilee's secret. On the Victory Tour, Plutarch pulls him into the attic of the Justice Building in District 11. The rebellion needs him. They're all part of a long chain, and it may take generations. Haymitch's job now is mentor. A new pair of tributes, every year, on his birthday.

He drinks because nepenthe doesn't exist. And one day he'll take Katniss and Peeta up to that same attic.

The Epilogue: Haymitch, Years Later

Decades on, Katniss has done what he couldn't. The Capitol has fallen, and the sun no longer rises on a reaping. Haymitch tells us how she got to him: Burdock's kid, brought to the Hob as a child, who reminded him of Louella. After Burdock died in the mines, he kept an eye on her from a distance. When he finally mentored her, he gave her Louella's old nickname.

He told Katniss and Peeta the truth while they were working on their memorial book. Soon after, they gave him a basket of goose eggs and an incubator. He raises the geese in Lenore's honor and takes them to the meadow. She doesn't haunt him anymore. In his head they've grown old together, and she keeps telling him it isn't time yet.

Haymitch's geese at the end of Mockingjay were a funny little detail for years. Collins has now ruined that for everyone.

FAQ

How many chapters does Sunrise on the Reaping have?

27 chapters across three parts, plus an Epilogue. Part 1 is The Birthday, Part 2 is The Rascal, and Part 3 is The Poster.

How does Sunrise on the Reaping end?

Haymitch wins the 50th Hunger Games, but the plan to destroy the arena fails. When he gets home, Snow has his mother and brother killed in a fire and poisons Lenore Dove. Haymitch turns to liquor and becomes a mentor. The Epilogue jumps ahead to after Mockingjay, when he's raising geese in Lenore's memory.

Who killed Lenore Dove?

President Snow. He had poisoned candy planted so Haymitch would feed it to her without knowing. She dies in his arms after asking him not to let the sun rise on another reaping.

Who is Lou Lou in Sunrise on the Reaping?

A girl the Capitol uses as a body double after Louella McCoy dies in the parade. She's drugged and controlled through an earpiece. The tributes work out she's most likely from District 11.

Who are Katniss's parents in Sunrise on the Reaping?

Burdock Everdeen and Asterid March. Burdock is Haymitch's best friend, and Asterid works at her family's apothecary in town.

Why does Haymitch drink in The Hunger Games?

He stays sober until after the Games. He turns to liquor when he loses his mother, Sid and Lenore Dove, and it's the only way he can stop reliving their deaths.

If you're not ready to leave Panem, here are a few places to go.