The book opens with 18-year-old Coriolanus making cabbage stew, an unwelcome reminder of his once wealthy family’s fall from grace. It is the day of reaping, a process in which the 12 districts’ tributes are chosen for the Hunger Games—and Coriolanus worries about his shirt of all things, intent on keeping up appearances. Tigris, his cousin, repurposes one of his father’s shirts into something respectable to wear.

Coriolanus struggles to keep the family financially afloat, hoping to shine in his upcoming role as mentor to one of the 24 tributes. The use of mentors is a new addition to the Hunger Games, implemented to revive interest in a tradition that, ten years after the 12 districts’ failed rebellion, still evokes antipathy in the Capitol and revulsion among the victims.

Those in the Capitol wish to bolster interest in the Games as a means of power and to discourage future attempts at rebellion; there are still signs of war, from the pockmarked façade of Coriolanus’s building, scarred by bullets, to rubble left in the streets. Coriolanus himself wishes to capitalize on the role so as to attend University, which he cannot afford otherwise. He is assigned to the female tribute from coal-mining District 12.