New ‘Hunger Games’ is really that good🔥

Happy “Hunger Games” week booklovers! It’s Clare Mulroy here, Paste BN’s Books Reporter. 

If you haven’t secured your copy of “Sunrise on the Reaping” yet, consider this your sign. Haymitch’s prequel is everything “Hunger Games” fans could want and more, with poignant commentary on authority, propaganda, class, reality and carefully-orchestrated fabrication. Suzanne Collins gives us a wider glimpse into Panem and the Capitol elite who control it, all through Haymitch’s sardonic perspective. As she did with “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” Collins grows empathy from the ground up – we come to know young Haymitch in a softer light.

Returning to the “Hunger Games” series as an adult, it felt like a heavier read, a more painful one. You understand the gravity of that loss differently when you’re a decade or more older than many of the tributes in the books. 

There are also a surprising number of beloved (and hated) “Hunger Games” characters that make a comeback in “Sunrise” as younger versions of themselves. Readers will be happy to see familiar faces and some long-awaited loose ends tied up, but don’t expect all the answers. There are plenty of open doors still for more “Hunger Games” books. 

I spent the week chatting with fans about what the series has meant to them over the last 17 years, including Suzanne Collins’ editor at Scholastic and a professor who teaches a “Hunger Games”-themed course at Butler University. (Don’t you wish you could go back in time and enroll in that?) It felt like a nostalgic trip back to the days of sepia filters over photos of side braids and Mockingjay pins and “Tiger Beat” magazine posters of Josh Hutcherson.

What do you think of the “Hunger Games” prequels? Did you like them as much as the original trilogy? Tell me what you thought at cmulroy@usatoday.com.