larryhammer | Redeeming the voice (Reply)

This happens depressingly often. I pick up someone's first novel and while it's flawed, I like it -- there's a fresh voice here, one I'm willing to follow even through a standard fantasy plot. Writers can learn inventiveness. Writers can learn ~~how to de-Sue~~ more complex characterization. So I look for their second book (or more often, the second book of their trilogy, for it turns out to be a previously unannounced trilogy) and go THUD. Because it sounds exactly like two-thirds of the fantasies out there. The one thing that made me buy it is gone: they've learned standard voice along with their other skills. But I read it anyway, because I care about the characters now, and maybe it's just sophomore slump that's homogenized things. And despite slogging through Fields of Meh, I get their third. Which is even more homogenized -- and I finally give up.

The last author this happened with was Katya Reimann -- couldn't get through her third. Now it's Elizabeth Kerner. I picked up Redeeming the Lost with trepidation, after the experience of The Lesser Kindred, and the first 50 pages haven't redeemed my continuing.

Does anyone else have this problem or is it just me?

ObLinkage: Balloon hats of the world.

---L.