I wonder if the reviewer (and hence the review) suffered from not knowing that there's a sequel. But, enh. ::shrugs:: Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, charge back into the fray.
What beats me is reviewers who don't at least suspect there might be a sequel. I mean I generally spot the likelihood at around the halfway mark or so, and it's not like sequels/series are unexpected in SFF. Strange strange people.
Before I comment: the following has nothing to do with Melusine, which I haven't read and which I'm v. much looking forward to reading.
That said. *g* As a reader, I can say that I don't care whether there's no sequel, one sequel, or twenty. I want a satisfying experience reading the book that I've got in my hands at the moment.
Which doesn't mean that every thread has to be tied up. (You don't have to tie up every thread even if you're writing a standalone.) It just means--and there are lots of ways to pull it off--that the book has to be satisfying. If it's not, I'm not going to be interested in any sequels, because I won't trust the writer to do a better job with them.
My thought was that, if you know the story isn't supposed to be entirely resolved by the end of the book, are you perhaps more inclined to accept that things dropped are going to be picked up again? Recognizing it as a feature rather than a bug, I mean.
I don't know. I hope Mélusine is satisfying in and of itself--I intended it to be--but I don't get to be the judge of that.
It's a good question. Expectations are funny things. For me...maybe yes, maybe no? Maybe I'm not one to answer. I don't really read for plot. But I'm sitting here trying to figure out why I feel one way about Ricardo Pinto's first novel (explicitly the first of several) and another way about the Midnighters books. And the closest I can come to pinpointing it is--forward motion and sense of arc. Feeling like we got _somewhere,_ even if not to the end?
It would be interesting to see what people who look for series books say, versus those of us who learn towards standalones.
I can get pretty torqued at books that are not in some way flagged as having/requiring a sequel. Especially when the author's good enough to keep me guessing fifty pages from the end how she's going to wrap everything up.
But the torquitude comes from getting to the end and suddenly staring at "To be continued."
There's nothing wrong with negative reviews, but I do think ones that say things like "I really wanted to like this book, but I just didn't" are obnoxious. I mean, I understand that sometimes one actually does want to like a book that turns out to be unsatisfying, but I don't think it's a very useful piece of information for the review-reader to have. It comes out sounding whiny and defensive, like, "I tried, okay? I gave this book a more than fair chance, okay?"
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I wonder if the reviewer (and hence the review) suffered from not knowing that there's a sequel. But, enh. ::shrugs:: Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, charge back into the fray.
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That said. *g* As a reader, I can say that I don't care whether there's no sequel, one sequel, or twenty. I want a satisfying experience reading the book that I've got in my hands at the moment.
Which doesn't mean that every thread has to be tied up. (You don't have to tie up every thread even if you're writing a standalone.) It just means--and there are lots of ways to pull it off--that the book has to be satisfying. If it's not, I'm not going to be interested in any sequels, because I won't trust the writer to do a better job with them.
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My thought was that, if you know the story isn't supposed to be entirely resolved by the end of the book, are you perhaps more inclined to accept that things dropped are going to be picked up again? Recognizing it as a feature rather than a bug, I mean.
I don't know. I hope Mélusine is satisfying in and of itself--I intended it to be--but I don't get to be the judge of that.
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It would be interesting to see what people who look for series books say, versus those of us who learn towards standalones.
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---L.
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But the torquitude comes from getting to the end and suddenly staring at "To be continued."
---L.
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(And, no, I don't mind if it's a negative review. Tell me anyway.)
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