Sunrise on the Reaping recap

Set a generation before Katniss, this prequel follows a sixteen-year-old Haymitch Abernathy of District 12, who is reaped into the fiftieth Hunger Games, the Second Quarter Quell, which demands double the usual tributes. Torn from his mother, younger brother, and his sweetheart Lenore Dove, Haymitch is thrown into an enormous, brutal arena against dozens of competitors. He forms an alliance with fellow District 12 tribute Maysilee Donner, and the two survive together until Maysilee is killed by a flock of vicious mutant birds. Reaching the arena's edge, Haymitch wins the Games when his last opponent's thrown weapon rebounds off the arena's force field and strikes her dead, a victory that exposes the Capitol's engineering and humiliates it. President Snow makes him pay: in revenge for the embarrassment, Snow has Haymitch's mother, his brother, and Lenore Dove killed. Haymitch returns home a victor with nothing left to live for, and the loss hardens into the bitter, hard-drinking man who will one day mentor the tributes of District 12.

In District 12, the poorest district of Panem, sixteen-year-old Haymitch Abernathy scrapes by in the Seam with his mother and younger brother and finds happiness with his sweetheart, Lenore Dove, a girl of the Covey musicians. But this year is a Quarter Quell, a special edition of the Hunger Games held every twenty-five years, and the fiftieth Games carry a cruel twist: each district must send double the usual number of tributes into the arena. When the reaping comes, Haymitch is chosen along with several other young people of District 12, wrenched away from everyone he loves and paraded before the cameras. Shipped to the Capitol to be readied for slaughter alongside dozens of other tributes, he resolves to keep his wits about him, survive whatever the Gamemakers throw at him, and find his way back home, even as the sheer scale of this Quell makes the odds more hopeless than ever.

Haymitch wins the fiftieth Hunger Games. After losing his ally Maysilee Donner to a swarm of Capitol-made mutant birds, he ends up as one of the final tributes and triumphs at the arena's boundary when a weapon hurled at him bounces off the arena's force field and kills his last opponent. But by turning the Capitol's own hidden machinery against a tribute and revealing its flaw on live television, he humiliates President Snow. Snow's retaliation is merciless: rather than punish Haymitch directly, he destroys everything Haymitch loves, and Haymitch's mother, his younger brother, and his sweetheart Lenore Dove are all killed. He comes home to District 12 a victor in name only, guilt-ridden and utterly alone, with no family and no future. The bright, quick-witted boy is gone, replaced by the grieving, sardonic drunk who will spend the coming decades watching District 12's children die in the Games, until, many years later, two of them finally give him a reason to fight again.