Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

This review contains spoilers.

“Sunrise on the Reaping” begins with an epigraph from author George Orwell: “All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.” 

Suzanne Collins’s newest “The Hunger Games” prequel examines this idea of media manipulation — how pervasive political narratives can lead to the submission of the many under the authority of a few.

For the uninitiated, Collins’s dystopian series centers around the titular Games (a misnomer, since the Hunger Games are games in the same way a guillotine is a kitchen knife). These annual events exist as a tool of control for the country’s authoritarian regime, known as the Capitol. In the Games, two randomly selected teenage citizens from each of the Capitol’s 12 districts are thrown into a fight to the death on national TV.

The protagonist of “Sunrise on the Reaping” is a familiar face to “Hunger Games” readers: Haymitch Abernathy, a former victor and mentor to Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of the original trilogy. “Sunrise on the Reaping” tells the tale of Haymitch’s Games, in which he defiantly tries to sabotage the arena.

Readers of the main series know exactly how Haymitch’s story ends: he wins the Games but seemingly at the cost of his capacity for hope. When readers first meet him 24 years later, his defining characteristic seems to be a proclivity for drink. 

In “Sunrise on the Reaping,” however, the younger version of Haymitch has yet to be so disillusioned. Stalked by death but still indignant, he spends the Games bent on exposing the fallibility of the Capitol with the Hail Mary determination of a man on death row. 

Throughout the Games, cameras broadcast the tributes’ every move to a morbidly enthralled audience outside the arena. Haymitch and his friends use the cameras to their advantage by performing acts of open resistance, as well as highlighting moments of tenderness, dignity and resilience in the face of their inhumane circumstances.

When he exits the arena victorious, however, Haymitch discovers the strength of the Capitol’s propaganda machine: the players’ compassion, anger and refusal to play along have been edited out of the broadcast, leaving Haymitch the only person with full knowledge of what really happened. Consequently, his Games reinforce the collective action problem amongst dissident citizens — maintaining the illusion that rebellious ideology is not only rare but impotent.

Collins warns that such narratives lead to implicit subordination on the part of the ruled. The book’s title is a reference to a quote from philosopher David Hume: “That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition… than the affirmation that it will rise.” Just as people assume the sun will rise every day, given it has done so since the dawn of humanity, the citizens in the novel are brainwashed into complacency. After all, the Capitol’s despotism is all they’ve ever known.

Though its message is grim, “Sunrise on the Reaping” is peppered with heartwarming allusions to the innate brightness of human nature. In a situation set up to pit the players against each other, the players form true alliances instead, with some even sacrificing themselves to save others. 

This seems to be a thematic echo to Collins’s previous novel, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” which asks whether the brutality of the Hunger Games reflects mankind’s true disposition. The answer is no, Collins implies: even in such artificially constructed dog-eat-dog circumstances, the human inclination towards solidarity and cooperation remains.

While “Sunrise on the Reaping” is a robust addition, I found this installment lacking the finesse that characterized the rest of the series. While previous books hid meta-narrative elements such as literary allusions or unreliable narrators between its pages, Collins seems to have lost faith in her readers’ ability to decode her writing.

All the thematic material was presented with the subtlety of an elephant trying to fit through a doorway: whenever Haymitch and his friends orchestrate a moment for the cameras, they explicitly compare it to the Capitol’s propaganda’s posters. Instead of leaving Hume’s “sunrise” quote as an epigraph for readers to muse on, Collins insists on having one of the characters, Lenore Gray, spell out how it relates to the learned helplessness of people surviving under a dictatorship.

Collins doesn’t just hammer the point home — she bludgeons readers over the head with it, which was such a departure from the understated nature of her previous books that it made me go back and check if she’s switched editors recently (she hasn’t). 

Despite being a little too on the nose, Collins has crafted a resonant piece in “Sunrise on the Reaping.” In a contemporary political climate so saturated with forceful and often contradictory narratives, her discussion of the intangible ways in which power is reinforced serves as compelling food for thought.

I only wish it hadn’t been shoved down my throat.