Book Review: Sunrise on the Reaping

This is a book review I wrote. The Hunger Games has been a part of my life for 7 years. But now I possess exceptional tools to read it well. I have been studying Risk Analysis for the past year as part of my Master's, and The Hunger Games is a great example of how Risk can be understood in our world and in the dystopian universe that Collins creates. Happy Reading :)

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“May the odds be ever in your favour.”

Set in a dystopian future, Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins depicts systemic violence in a world of authoritarian governments, controlled media narratives, and propaganda that contribute to our understanding of risk by reframing it as a form of resistance to the oppressive state. The novel positions the body as a site through which risk is enacted, transformed, and revolutionized. 

Risk, however, is not confined to dystopia. It is a structural byproduct of our capitalist socio-political reality, and we are its subjects. “Risk is not something to anticipate but to endure; so long as capitalism generates insecurity at its core, risk will be perpetually reproduced” (Kallman, 2025). It is in this endurance that we learn to use risk as an approach for survival and becoming agentive actors. Our value systems and agency become the assets we protect, and rebellion is the approach we use. This novel serves as an optimal example for theorizing risk as an approach for survival through rebellion.

The Hunger Games are a televised spectacle in which children, called Tributes, from each district are forced to fight to the death in an arena designed by the Capitol, which is the government. The story follows Haymitch Abernathy from District 12, chosen as tribute for the 50th Hunger Games. As he navigates the brutality of the arena, his understanding of survival as a performance becomes apparent. Through his encounters with his district partner, Louella McCoy, the Capitol’s Gamemakers, and the viewing public, Sunrise on the Reaping traces the creation of a quiet rebellion through gradual risks taken by its characters.

In Collins’ universe exists a system that resembles our own, in which fear, purity, and surveillance assemble to form society. Building on Michel Foucault’s reality of truth regimes and governmentality (Foucault 2008), with social structures based around Mary Douglas’ conception of purity and pollution (Lupton 2013), this review theorizes the expression of agency. What Sunrise on the Reaping offers, however, is not only an instance of control over a people but also an inquiry into the possibilities of agency within it. 

In Panem, citizens are mandated to attend an annual Reaping- a public lottery masquerading as a random chance to choose the children that go to the Hunger Games- but it is actually a function of punishment that is systemically created by the wielder of power- the Capitol. Citizens become participants in their own subjugation, being forced to perform grief and obedience under the omnipresent cameras that create narratives far from the lived realities. Louella McCoy’s family refuses to cry for the cameras after she has been reaped for the Hunger Games. Their refusal to perform is an exhibition of subtle rebellion. In that moment of silence, surveillance loses its script. The McCoy’s reclaim their agency through disobedience, even though it does not change the inevitability of Louella’s death. 

Through Foucault’s lens, the Reaping and the Games exemplify governmentality and how the state governs not through force alone, but through subtle exertions of power and the internalization of fear and surveillance (Foucault 2008). Yet when Louella’s family refuses to cry for the broadcast, the machinery of governmentality falters. Their silence denies t he script written for them; the performance of obedience morphs into a refusal that exposes power’s dependence on participation.

Once the Tributes reach the Capitol, they are scrubbed with insecticide rather than soap. This is a violent cleansing ritual portrayed as hygiene. Haymitch’s reflection of this act, “whatever fight any of us had in us has been squelched” (Collins 2025), captures the essence of Douglas’s conception of purity and pollution. For the Capitol, risk is embodied in the savage and dangerous nature of the districtfolk, which is categorized as sin and expelled from the body through the process of purification (Lupton 2013). The Capitol’s risk-based approach identifies and manages the perceived threat through cleansing rituals. The danger is made orderly, and the human is made compliant. The body becomes the boundary through which control is enacted. Yet the same body can become a weapon through which autonomy is reclaimed.

For instance, when Haymitch drags Louella’s corpse to the President’s mansion, he applauds the President before the cameras, silently assigning blame for Louella’s death. “If this is still being recorded and possibly aired,” he thinks, “maybe it does make a difference… maybe this is where I paint my own poster” (Collins 2025). Here, the body becomes the site where risk is both administered and reclaimed. What the Capitol sought to sanitize becomes uncontainable. The Capitol’s symbol of subjugation becomes Haymitch’s language of agency. The dual paradox of the body and risk lies in their shared instability. They are both sites of control and resistance, simultaneously disciplined by power and capable of subverting power from within.

Our society lives under constant risk of economic uncertainty, surveillance, inequality, and the implicit policing of behavior, and even though risk is an objective condition of existence, we find deliberate ways to assert our own autonomy. For instance, by holding the emergency exit open on the subway for people, one takes the risk of being penalised for breaking the law, but does it anyway because enduring this risk allows them to perform their agency and be accepted as a part of society. Similarly, when Haymitch carries Louella’s body to the President’s mansion, he is hoping that those in his district are watching and might accept him as one of their own- even postpartum. His rebellion is therefore concurrently political and intimate. He asserts his agency and desire to continue belonging to the world that shaped him.

Victors of the Games receive housing, wealth, and life-sustaining resources as winnings. It is the perfect capitalist illusion- risk is repackaged as opportunity. In a capitalist society, this illusion takes the form of insurance. Danger is monetized, and safety is sold back to us. We pay money not to be safe, but to feel safe, converting fear into policy and survival into a subscription. Capitalism reproduces risk at its core, ensuring that endurance becomes the price of existence. It is endlessly reproduced.

The Capitol’s proverb, “May the odds be ever in your favour,” perfectly captures the paradox of risk in both Collins’s world and our own. The phrase disguises structural violence as random chance, transforming systemic inequality into a game of luck. But, as Anthony Giddens (1991) theorizes, agency under modernity is always exercised within constraint and creates the illusion of autonomy. In this novel, the odds are systemically never in favour of the Giddensian actor- the districtfolk. Whether through the lottery-seeming Reaping that is actually designed, risk never disappears; it only changes form. That same paradox operates in our reality, where the illusion of individual choice disguises unequal structures. Success is framed as luck or hard work, while failure is blamed on personal inadequacy rather than systemic design. The “odds” are presented as fair, yet access to opportunity and stability remains contingent on class and capital.

In our world, risk is not only something to anticipate but something to endure. It is a structural byproduct of capitalism itself, which generates insecurity at its core to sustain participation (Kallman, 2025). Sunrise on the Reaping builds on this reality by showcasing the Capitol, which, like capitalism, depends on the constant production of insecurity to maintain order. Through endurance, rebellion, and the assertion of agency, risk becomes a language of survival. Haymitch’s defiance, The McCoy’s silence, and even the Capitol’s spectacle of control, remind us that risk endures because we do- we reproduce it every time it is leveraged as a medium of autonomy.

We replicate this understanding of risk every day, though less dramatically, when marginalized groups organize despite the great risk of being penalized, or when someone simply chooses to transgress in kindness in an unforgiving city- these are risks taken to preserve agency and are also a desperate attempt to belong. Collins’ advances our understanding of risk by exposing its dual nature- as a mechanism of control and a language of resistance. Haymitch’s journey from chosen victim to reluctant victor is a magnification of how risk governs us. She highlights how agency, intimacy, and values become the assets we strive to protect. Enduring risk becomes the means that preserves connection, meaning, and the right to define ourselves within structures that are always trying to do it for us.

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Thank you for reading. I would love to know what you think. Here's the music that gave me company as I produced this work over 2 months. 

The Playlist- Haymitch