I just finished
Dead Until Dark: A Sookie Stackhouse Novelby Charlaine Harris, which is book #1 of the Sookie Stackhouse, made even more popular by the HBO series based on the book series:
True Blood.
I thought about basically copying my
GoodReads review into this space, but I'm trying to make this blog about more than just single book reviews. So I thought I would reflect a little about series in general - what I like and what I don't.
When I was younger, I read series all the time, probably more than anything else. My Mom sells Christian books to libraries, and the series I remember the most vividly is
The Mandie Books by Lois Gladys Leppard. They could be seen as a pre-cursor to Nancy Drew, a young girl detective, with the added interest of being set in the 19th century, and Mandie's father is pure Cherokee. (Wow, I just looked these up for the first time in years and years, only to find that the author went to the university where I work. How is that for a connection?)
One summer my Mom brought home an entire run of the old Bobbsey Twins mysteries, the ones with the light purple cover. I must have read each one three times. My favorite was
The Bobbsey Twins and the Secret of Candy Castle because of this one scene where a closet turns out to be a secret elevator, and I spent hours that summer trying to find the button in my bedroom closet.
I remember reading The Babysitter's Club, Sweet Valley High, you name it. Maybe part of my problem with series as an adult is that I associate them so heavily with childhood. I can't think of a single series that is what I would call "serious," in fact most belong to the "beach reading" genre. I have to admit to not really understanding this genre. (I read
Gravity's Rainbow
on vacation once. Does that make it a beach read?)
In my adult reading life, the only series I can say I read all of is Harry Potter. Of course, these are children's books too, right? I read the first book of a lot of series. I thought I'd like The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, until I realized in book 3 that the author was intentionally sending all his characters off on quests with no real action until the end, just in time to create a cliffhanger to make me buy the next book. I caught on and was not amused. Most of the time, if you don't like the characters or the story in the first book of a series, you might as well skip the rest, because the whole point seems to be to capitalize on what made the first one successful.
Assuming that philosophy is true, I would imagine the rest of the Sookie Stackhouse novels are full of naive Sookie trying to navigate a new world of vampire's girlfriend etiquette, life-threatening drama, and how to use her mind-reading abilities, with a good dose of gratuitous sex and violence thrown in for good measure. I think a lot of readers like that predictability, with enough action to make you think you've gone somewhere, not really realizing that the author is actually limiting what is going on so she can squeeze out another 10-15 books in the series before the story is over. I guess I'd rather read a long, well-developed, self-contained novel. To me, that is just more satisfying.
One more side note before I go - the Sookie Stackhouse books are often classified into the sub-genre of urban fantasy, but these are set in a small southern town. I'll go along with the masses and reign in my impulse to reclassify everything.
(Parasol Protectorate 
by Tilar J. Mazzeo
by Alicia Yánez Cossío