I do not usually review YA, but I am making an exception for this one. Why?
First, it is a continuation of a series that I read before it ever became popular—my job as a school librarian meant that I frequently knew about new books before everyone else did.
Second, I want to feature it here, because it has something going for it that can sometimes be tricky for the emerging writer—emotional resonance. You might consider reading it just to see how this is done well.
Emotional depth is one of the top weaknesses in manuscripts of emerging writers. The reasons are various:
- it is difficult to dig deep and put emotion on the page.
- it requires that the writer parse emotion and how it is experienced by different characters.
- writers are frequently told to “show not tell” which they sometimes interpret to mean that they should never tell the reader anything, but should find multitudes of facial expressions and bodily movements to convey emotion.
- writers have to work hard to understand emotions and how to make the reader feel them with a character rather than saying they exist. Nobody ever said writing was easy.
If you are looking for a good example of emotional depth, Suzanne Collins is excellent. It’s true, the premise is loaded, but that isn’t the only reason we feel with the characters. She manages to put us on the journey with her characters so that even if we do not like them, we feel for them and with them. This is writing that moves people, makes them want to talk about the book, and makes the book stand out in a crowded field of bland, pedestrian choices.
In Sunrise on the Reaping, the reader is taken back to before Catniss and the Mockingjay, to the story of Haymitch Abernathy. It is interesting to point out here that if you have been reading the series, you already know how his story ends, so she is giving us the HOW and the WHY, not the what. Which proves both that a down ending is not a novel killer, and that giving away the ending is not always wrong, but I digress.
At each turning point in the story, just when you think nothing else can go wrong it does, generally. But that is not the only thing going on. Even when things go right, the reader feels it. We feel him love his family and his girl, resent that his birthday is the day of the Reaping, hate the capital, yearn to do something BIG. We feel it all, on every page, and it is this feeling that makes us want to keep reading. We know he will end up as an alcoholic past victor, but we don’t know how he got there or why. His story shows us how and why and makes us feel everything he feels along the way.
Read it, or listen to it, if you want to get some tips for how to infuse your own writing with emotional depth.
Highly recommended. You don’t have to have read the rest of the series, but you may like it more if you have.
