by Suzanne Collins, 2025
Book 5 of the Hunger Games series. Hopeless and depressing – the prequel to Katniss and Peeta’s story. This is about the 50th anniversary of the Hunger Games, when Haymitch Abernathy is taken from District 12. He’s a 16 year-old and he narrates the story, and it’s awful – everyone he likes, loves, ends up dead. Everything he tries to do ends up failing. He ends up the victor but when he returns home, the first thing that happens is his mom and little brother, Sid, burn to death in a horrible fire. Then, he sees his love, Lenore Dove, running to him in a beautiful meadow, and she finds a bag of gumdrops. He feeds her one and it ends up being poison. She dies in his arms. These are the very last pages of the book. The first 350 pages are more of the same – Haymitch truly cares about someone and they die a horrible death. Or Haymitch has a plan to blow up the arena and it fails. Everyone he loves dies a horrible death. Everything he tries to do fails miserably. He is alone. He’s a wretched alcoholic and lives with no purpose until the Epilogue when he meets Katniss and Peeta and they bring him a basket of goose eggs, not to eat, but to hatch. Then he can fulfill his promise to Lenore Dove to end the reaping. But it takes 380 pages of awfulness, sadness, futility, with no hope, to get to the last 2 pages of Epilogue where there is finally some hope.