Let’s Talk Bookish: What Books Need Sequels?

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Book Nook Bits has hosted since April 2022.

September 8: What books need sequels? 
(ikwords @ Words on Key)

Prompts: What books need sequels? Can a great book be ruined by having unnecessary sequels? How do you feel about standalones with “open endings” that feel like cliffhanger, but are the actual end of the story?

The first part of this is quite hard to answer – it really depends on the book itself. Some naturally lend themselves to sequels, others work perfectly well as standalone books. Sometimes you read a standalone that would make for a great series, other times you read a series and think it could have been one book! A lot of fantasy lends itself to ‘sequels’ more than, say, horror. How do you class romance series’, too? Is it a sequel if the focus shifts to a different member of the same family? A strict sequel in romance often doesn’t work, as you don’t want to shatter the HEA, but at the same time it can be really fun to revisit the characters as part of another story, or return to the same small town that’s fleshed out so well in a previous book.

I definitely think a book can be ruined if the story is stretched out too long in unnecessary sequels. Ideally, a book should be written with the idea of a series in mind – there needs to be enough tantalizing information the reader wants to return, but it shouldn’t be done in such a heavy-handed way a book feels hugely incomplete. It takes skill on the author’s part to give us a contained story but leave it just open ended enough we want more. I’ve read book 1s before that left things on too much of a cliffhanger for a first book, and it’s made me not want to read the series because it feels almost like trying to force you to read book 2.

I think for standalones…that really depends. I haven’t read too many that have left a book on a cliffhanger, thankfully, but largely if I came across it too often I’d find it annoying. It’s fine to leave things a touch open, I think, as the author may have plans to one day return, or it may lead into something even if it’s not a direct sequel, but I think cliffhanger endings are best left to books that aren’t the first or last in a series, and typically best avoided in standalone books, though there are always exceptions.