To Sophomore Slump or To Not Sophomore Slump
Don’t you love when you pick up a book and it’s *chef’s kiss* golden? The characters, the story, the tone. It’s everything. And then you get to the end and you find out…oh my god, there’s a SEQUEL? So you, of course, pick it up immediately, and it’s just…meh. It’s not the same. It’s hardly what you’d hoped for, and it doesn’t bring you the same kind of joy the first one sparked in you.
It’s disappointing to say the least. And part of the blame belongs on you. You have your expectations on the moon, and you’re still riding the high the first one gave you. It’s not fully the writer’s fault that they didn’t live up to your impossible expectations. Sure, they tried, but I can’t tell you how many reviews I’ve read where the reader gave a low rating purely because it didn’t meet their expectations. It’s not because the writer didn’t try.
This is a big reason I often keep my standards for things low and I try not to over-hype them. It’s generally worked for me, and is a frequently why I’m not usually let down by things. It also allows me to enjoy things that aren’t necessarily “good.” Like Rise of Skywalker, but we won’t go there.
I’m thinking about how many times I’ve read or seen reviews about an author’s second novel or the sequel to one of their books. How much we can be let down by them. We don’t take into account how ass-kicking it is to write a sequel in the first place, but that’s another topic for another day.
I’ve been thinking about this because I just read Good Girl, Bad Blood, the sequel to A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. Pretty much all my 5 star reads last year were YA novels, and AGGGTM was one of the easiest 5 out of 5s I gave. You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson and Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston were the other two. But we’re still waiting on their next releases (and holy cheese I am SO EXCITED). Okay, okay, chill expectations, Ashley. Calm down. Anyway, I recommended AGGGTM to one of my best pals, and she flew through it, much like I did. She immediately picked up the sequel, and I decided it was time to read it myself. We were talking afterwards, and I said that it was 5 stars, easy, though I do think I prefer the first book.
It led me to a bunch of internal questions regarding the scale we personally rate books by, but it also made me think about how good of a sequel this was. Not Toy Story, of course, but definitely great.
It of course had to be bigger. There’s an aftermath from the first book that had to be built on. It couldn’t be like an episodic TV show or a crime book series that simply follows the same detective for twenty books where the plot is essentially the same but the side characters change. Nope, Pip had to have a new challenge, and how many cold cases could exist in a fully walkable small town anyway? As Pip notices herself, what she had the first time that she doesn’t here is time, which definitely influenced the pacing and how she went about her detective work. The risks have changed, and that’s what made it its own from the first book. It held onto all the aspects that were so well done and well loved—Pip’s detective skills, Ravi Singh, challenging the “good girl persona,” small town gossip—but made it fresh, built upon those things, and fleshed out the characters based on the aftermath of their previous arcs.
It wasn’t perfect, but I greatly enjoyed it, and it really did live up to the expectations I tried my best not to have. My biggest critiques involve spoilers, so I’ll leave them out of this.
I often think about the way sequels, second seasons, sophomore albums, etc have so much to uphold in our minds. Because nothing you love is ever going to feel the way it did when you first discovered it. The job of a sequel, which I think we forget, isn’t to recreate that exact feeling we had the first go around. We want it to, and that’s why we get so disappointed. But really, it’s supposed to expand the lens of the first story. It has to have a bigger scope and just be more. One show I always think about when I think about this is Stranger Things. The second season had some shortcomings, for sure, but it did what a second season was supposed to: it grew. There wasn’t just one monster to fight, there were demo-dogs and the shadow monster, the characters began to deal with more than just a lost friend but a further loss of innocence, and of course, new characters to shake up the dynamics. And it largely felt organic and unforced (to an extent, obviously).
A lot of shows don’t live up to this, and it’s why we lose interest. I personally view it as a sign that the development in the first story could’ve been a bit stronger, since it has to leave a lasting impression. Enough to hype you up for whatever could be next for the characters. It’s not enough to just enjoy them.
This is why I am a big fan of standalones and limited series. One and done, baby.
I’ve always said I won’t write sequels. It’s hard enough for me to get through the first thing, I don’t want to trudge my way through something I know won’t give me the same feeling. Scenes, chapters, side quests, sure. But an entire new adventure? My brain isn’t strong enough for that. My big bad spy YA was really tough. There were a lot of moving parts, and I still think it’s not as good as it could be. I’m constantly wanting to edit it, and I do fear it’ll never be finished. But I did something bad, and I started to brainstorm. What if? If I did ever write a sequel (ya know, if this one ever sees the light of day), what would my MCs do next? How would I build upon this thread I’ve started.
And because my brain is my brain, I only have scenes, chapters, and side quests. I have no clue what Plot A would be. Because sequels are hard!
But I think books are a tad different. If you’re writing a TV show, you’ve got to have a plan for if it gets picked up season after season. You can tell that some shows don’t have this or they sort of do but not really, and now they’re so convoluted, you can’t keep up. They’re so full of chaos, you can watch all you want but you still have no idea what’s going on—even if there’s source material! I hope we’re all thinking of the same show.
With books, you might not even get to publish that next story. You might not even want to write a next story at all. So you left the last chapter open-ended as a fail-safe, who’s to say you’ll ever go back to it? Your publisher, that’s who. And generally, if your brain is thinking series, you’ve got a fairly good idea of how many installments there will be.
It makes me think about what my favorite author Ally Carter has said time and time again when people ask if she’ll ever return to writing Gallagher Girls books: you don’t want another story, you want to reread them again for the very first time. And that’s what makes sequels and follow ups so hard! To write, to read, to love.
Bottom line is the “sophomore slump” is real. It’s foreboding. That ominous shadow Mufasa once told us to never go. But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. Round of applause for successfully finding your footing in Book 2, pals. Hope I can join you one day. Ya know, if I ever get a Book 1.