This is the second installment in a weeklong series of the Wildcat staff’s favorite things of 2025.

I first opened Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games in seventh grade, finishing it in one adrenaline-filled and ultimately sleepless night, immediately followed the next morning by the destruction of my room in search of its sequels, Catching Fire and Mockingjay. And when I acquired the prequel to the trilogy, 2020’s The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, another all-nighter ensued. 

So when the series’ second prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, was announced in 2024, I joined the many millions of other Hunger Games fans running to friends, book clubs, and the internet to discuss and predict: Would it be a hastily written money-grab like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child? Would it fall into the prequel “trap” and contradict facts from its companion novels? Could it ever possibly match up with the masterpiece that was The Hunger Games? 

The answer to the last question: yes. Released on March 18, the novel does not disappoint. 

Sunrise on the Reaping follows The Hunger Games’s blunt and usually-drunk protagonist Haymitch Abernathy who, in this prequel, is a slightly more honorable, slightly less surly teenager 24 years before Katniss Everdeen enters the picture armed with a bow and arrows.

Collins returns to the arena with her usual ingenious plotting; another roster of memorable characters; the most intriguing setting in dystopian literature, Panem; and ever-relevant themes of power and corruption. 

Also fascinating are the awfully immoral creations of the Capitol — the machine-like arena, the meticulously constructed propaganda, and the bio-engineered animal “muttations” that were introduced in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. 

Collins’s character development once again shines from Haymitch trying (and failing) to be the selfish, apathetic rascal of the Games, to the amusing snark and “tough love” of Maysilee Donner. 

I also appreciated the interconnectedness between The Sunrise on the Reaping, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (a backstory of the Games told from the villainous Coriolanus Snow’s perspective), and The Hunger Games trilogy, and the continued world-building of Panem. 

I’m not alone in calling this continuance of the Hunger Games story the best novel of the year — Sunrise on the Reaping won the Goodreads Choice Award for best young adult title in 2025. 

And for fans of the book series, and its adaptations, another glimpse of Panem awaits: Sunrise on the Reaping hits movie theaters next November.