>Fiction doing backflips

by Roger Sutton
Feb 04, 2008 | Filed in Articles & Opinion
>In watching the three Bourne movies in close succession over the past week, Richard and I spotted a neat thing we had missed when viewing them at the theater: the final scene of the second movie, The Bourne Supremacy, is also the climax of the third movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, with a completely different dramatic purpose. I asked Elizabeth if she could think of any books-in-series that worked this way, and she came up with two related but inexact examples: that it wasn't until Lloyd Alexander had submitted The High King to his editor Ann Durrell that she told him he had missed a book and sent him off to write Taran Wanderer; and that Jan Karon was forced after the fact by fans to plug a plot hole in her Mitford series. Any others?
Roger Sutton
Roger Sutton

Editor Emeritus Roger Sutton was editor in chief of The Horn Book, Inc., from 1996-2021. He was previously editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books and a children's and young adult librarian. He received his MA in library science from the University of Chicago in 1982 and a BA from Pitzer College in 1978.

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Roger Sutton

>I'm not sure just what I meant, but Millicent and the Dicey books are excellent examples of devious connections among novels (I don't remember the Ruby books well enough to say). Isn't there a mention in Homecoming or Dicey's Song of Gran having thrown a telephone through a window, a scene we get to see for ourselves in The Runner?

Posted : Feb 12, 2008 04:20

Melinda

>And if that is what you mean, then Cynthia Voigt did that with Homecoming and Come a Stranger (from Mina's pov) and the whole Tillerman series.

Posted : Feb 12, 2008 07:11

Cheryl

>Not sure if this is exactly what you mean, but I will be a book-proud editor and point out the work of Lisa Yee, whose MILLICENT MIN, GIRL GENIUS; STANFORD WONG FLUNKS BIG-TIME, and SO TOTALLY EMILY EBERS examine one summer (and often the same scenes) among three friends from their three very different points of view.

Posted : Feb 08, 2008 09:22

Anonymous

>Rosa Guy? Didn't she examine the same events from different viewpoints in some of her books? I think that I remember The Friends overlapping with Edith Jackson and another book.

Posted : Feb 07, 2008 06:19

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