Epic Fantasy Meets Sequel Prejudice

t the ripe old age of twelve, I fancied myself quite the expert on epic fantasy. I had read the Chronicles of Narnia in third grade after watching the animated version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in class; the Chronicles of Prydain in fourth grade after my teacher read aloud The Book of Three; The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy in fifth grade, having seen movie versions on television several years earlier, but only later coming across the books in the public library; and the Dark Is Rising sequence in sixth grade, stumbling upon a copy of The Grey King in the school library. I knew at a very early age what I liked and why I liked it.

Above everything else — the terrific plotting, the nifty world-building, the sense of awe and wonder and magic — the potent appeal of fantasy for me was that while so many of the mundane, ordinary things of life were controlled by adults, the really important things — the fate of the universe, the battle between good and evil — were left in the capable hands of children. To dismiss this yearning as simply escapism is to underestimate the powerful psychological need I had — that many young readers of fantasy have — to be taken seriously, to be treated as a person even if I was still a child. Susan Cooper completely got the relationship between fantasy author and child reader when she wrote, “One full-grown imagination is speaking to another.”

I no longer read fantasy to satiate that childhood hunger, but I still find the best of the genre just as good as I ever did. No one could be more pleased that His Dark Materials, Harry Potter, and the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy have led to the current fantasy renaissance. And yet the flood of fantasy underscores and perhaps exacerbates the difficulty of properly evaluating these books. While I do think there is sort of an institutional prejudice against fantasy — that it does not get as many starred reviews, make as many prestigious lists, or win as many awards as it should — I doubt it suffers greater prejudice than genres such as nonfiction, poetry, and easy readers. However, fantasy prejudice is further complicated by sequel prejudice. Many fantasy books are published in a sequence, and the relationship between these books — whether the sequence comprises loosely connected episodes or one long story broken into several parts — can be problematic.

Whether you are dropped into the middle of a story or left hanging at the end, the result of reading an entry in a sequence is often an uncomfortable sort of confusion. You may wonder about what you have missed, or what is to come, to such a degree that you are prevented from becoming truly passionate about a particular entry. Consider, for example, three superb fantasies of last year, each of which is part of a sequence, and each of which presents its own challenge for readers: Dreamhunter by Elizabeth Knox; The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner; and Ptolemy’s Gate by Jonathan Stroud. Dreamhunter, the first book in the Dreamhunter Duet, closes with an electrifying (but maddening) cliffhanger — the chaos following the horrible nightmare that Laura sprung on an unsuspecting Rainbow Opera crowd. The story ends abruptly at the climax with nary a hint of resolution. Fantasy readers tend to be a rather patient lot, and they are accustomed to dangling plot threads, but even their patience can be tested by a cliffhanger ending.

The King of Attolia, the third book about Eugenides, the Thief of Eddis, is to my mind a clear-cut stand-alone title, but many people disagree. Perhaps it is because the second entry, The Queen of Attolia, gives readers a precise knowledge of the relationship between Eugenides and his queen. The reader who has not read the second, then, comes to the third without knowing whether the marriage is genuine or merely a strategic political alliance. This is the kind of ambiguity I find pleasing, and I think the book may be stronger for it. The King of Attolia is a subtle story of intrigue with intricate plotting and characterization; it keeps you second-guessing what you think you know; and, like an iceberg, there is much more going on under the surface than above it. Perhaps this, too, creates the illusion that the book is more dependent on the earlier installments than it really is. Many readers will assume that the previous volumes hold the answers to their many questions — i.e., if only they knew the backstory, they would not be so confused — but the truth is that the book demands an attentive reader, and those unaccustomed to reading (and rereading) with concentration and purpose will likely feel lost.

If there is the perception in King of Attolia that there is missing backstory, it is more of a reality in Ptolemy’s Gate, the final book in the Bartimaeus Trilogy. While each volume does have a distinct narrative arc, the trilogy is a much more integrated fantasy sequence, essentially one story carved into three pieces; narrative strands are left dangling that feed into the mystery of the next book. The Bartimaeus Trilogy is rare in that not only does it avoid the weak-middle-book syndrome, but each new book surpasses the previous one. (A pertinent aside: Stroud’s trilogy won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature, which, in acknowledgment of the difficulty inherent in judging fantasy, allows for both stand-alone titles and entire sequences to be nominated. For most of the major annual literary awards, of course, a book needs to win on its own merit rather than the cumulative power of the entire series.)

As I monitored the online discussion about The King of Attolia and Ptolemy’s Gate on the adbooks listserv late last year, it was clear that there was strong disagreement about whether or not these titles stood alone. Some people thought both did; some thought neither did; and some thought one book did but not the other. Yet, interestingly, the reading of the earlier books in each series did not seem to be a good predictor of how a person would feel about the integrity of a book as a stand-alone title.

Since I’m an avid fantasy reader, I’m usually in on the beginning of a series and rarely need to read books out of order, but I did read two this year — Dreamquake by Elizabeth Knox and A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve — in order to put myself in the shoes of the uninitiated and better understand the challenges of evaluating sequels. Dreamhunter slipped under my radar last year, so before I read its sequel, I did two simple things: I checked out the concise plot summary of the first book on the jacket flap and read the glossary. This gave me enough background information to construct the world of the novel as I was quickly plunged into the action. Clearly there were allusions to the first book — missing pieces of the puzzle, so to speak — but rather than confusing me, I found them to be intriguing ambiguities, reasons to go back and read the first book. In spite of the gaps, I felt confident that I could competently evaluate the literary elements here: plot, character, setting, theme, and style.

Several years ago, I read the first hundred pages of Mortal Engines before passing it on to an eager student desperate to read it, but I never got back to finishing it or to reading the next two books in the sequence — Predator’s Gold and Infernal Devices. So this year I tackled the daunting task of reading the fourth and final installment in the Hungry City Chronicles without having read any of the previous entries. While A Darkling Plain has its own narrative arc, it certainly makes no pretense of being a stand-alone title. There is not much to help the reader recapitulate the previous action of the sequence, let alone sort through the novel’s multitude of characters, settings, and political alliances. It took me about fifty pages to acclimate myself to the novel (though, in fact, that is often true even when I have followed a series from the beginning, especially if a few years have elapsed between each entry’s publication). I found coping strategies to process chunks of incomplete information. If, for example, I did not understand the distinction between the various political factions, I could still use context clues to sort them into good guys and bad guys. If I did not know the exact details of Hester’s betrayal, I could still infer the generalities, and I could empathize with the characters’ resultant emotions. Again, I felt that I could evaluate the literary merit of this novel without having all the puzzle pieces.

Whether reading a first book that ends in a cliffhanger or a final book that assumes prior knowledge, the great challenge of judging a book in a sequence is to assess it simultaneously on two levels: first on its own merits, and then as a part of the larger whole (which cannot be done, obviously, when only the first book has been published). It requires faith, patience, and an open mind to assess a series entry only on the first level. While I feel confident that I can evaluate the book in hand and live with the mystery of the unread or unwritten, I know that many readers will be left in a state of confusion. But the confusion speaks more to the character of the reader than it does to the quality of the novel, and those of us in positions to spotlight the best books of the year have an obligation to wrestle with this dilemma.

While most of us have the luxury of reading books in their proper order — and reading only books we like — the gatekeepers among us, those who dispense the accolades, have a charge to read far more broadly than the average reader. Reviewers who have been assigned a book can read or skim the previous volumes or at least read the reviews. Many review journals make the process easier by assigning subsequent books in a series to the same reviewer. Members of the ALSC Notable Children’s Book committee and the YALSA Best Books for Young Adults committee, however, have the more daunting task of reading so widely in the field as to preclude adding anything extraneous to their charge. Members of the other award committees have a similarly broad charge, but the singular focus on a handful of best books allows for both the rereading and the researching that close scrutiny demands. The presence of The High King, The Grey King, and The Hero and the Crown in the Newbery canon is a testament to the ability of committees to wrestle with the issue of sequel prejudice and overcome it. When popular opinion goes on to validate critical acclaim, it is the mark of an enduring book, and each of these beloved classics has become just that. While the Printz committee has yet to recognize a fantasy sequel, the designation as honor books of True Believer, the second book in Virginia Euwer Wolff’s Make Lemonade Trilogy, and the first installment of M. T. Anderson’s Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation sets a precedent that paves the way for honoring a fantasy sequel in the future.

There is a long tradition of sequels and series in children’s literature. These books represent a comfort zone for reader and writer alike, and while all genres of writing face some degree of sequel prejudice in the evaluation process, nothing brings it out more than fantasy literature. “There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book,” Philip Pullman has famously said. He might have added that they are also too large for just a single children’s book. It is the scale of things — the larger cast of characters, the multiple and varied settings, the endlessly detailed world-building — that lend themselves to the treatment of equally large ideas in a fantasy sequence. The broad, panoramic canvas of epic fantasy moves the story beyond the confines of the home, the school, and the neighborhood into the larger world, not just the larger world of society and politics, but also of metaphysics and philosophy. The best epic fantasy also has the ability to bring its story more deeply into the inner world of the self, to explore what it means to be human through metaphor and symbolism and poetry. That is a tall order for one book, regardless of genre, and it requires an author with the talent to pull off such a vision. But when it does happen, it brings back that childhood sense of wonder and magic and awe.

While the world waited with anticipation for the seventh and final Harry Potter, a plethora of notable fantasy sequels were also published this year, Dreamquake and A Darkling Plain among them. Others include The Lion Hunter by Elizabeth E. Wein; Kenneth Oppel’s Darkwing, a prequel to the Silverwing trilogy; Bloodsong by Melvin Burgess, a sequel to Bloodtide; Angel Isle by Peter Dickinson, a sequel to The Ropemaker; The Land of the Silver Apples by Nancy Farmer, a sequel to The Sea of Trolls; and The Titan’s Curse by Rick Riordan, the third book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. From my experience as a reader, teacher, and librarian, I believe that fantasy literature can be for others what it was for me: the gateway to reading. The passion of young readers for the genre is clearly matched by the care with which the best authors craft these stories, and if we, as gatekeepers, are really serious about choosing the best books of the year, then we must match those qualities in our evaluation. We must overcome sequel prejudice; these books and their loyal readers deserve no less.

Jonathan Hunt is a library media teacher at the Lakewood, Pearson, and Wilson Elementary Schools in Modesto, California, and a member of the 2008 Printz committee.