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Originally Posted by wayrad
(Speaking of which, I'll never forget the spot in the fist book where a character was introduced as "Allannon". I kept expecting him to pull out a 12-step plan. Land of Bad Names, indeed.)
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Say Dennis, are we counting kids'/YA books?
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Sure. Why not?
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I recently ran across one of the sequels to The Diamond in the Window, and while not horrible, it certainly lacked the surreal quality, as well as the slightly wacky charm, of the original.
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I just think there are books that became series and we may wish they hadn't.
In some cases, you can argue that later books were worth doing, but weren't up to the quality of the original.
For instance, Madeliene L'Engle's _A Wrinkle In Time_ spawned several followups, which I think were progressively weaker books, though I'll stop short of saying "She should have stopped with Wrinkle".
It sounds like your Diamond in the Window sequel fits in that category.
In other cases, you get books where the conceit supported a nopvel, but not a series. One I'd place in that category is Harry Harrison's _Bill, the Galactic Hero_. The original was satire, intended in part as a response to Robert A. Heinlein's _Starship Troopers_. Harry was politically poles apart from Heinlein. Bill was a rube from an agricultural planet, enlisted by ruse in a military fighting a lizard like alien race called the Chingers, serving under officers who
start at incompetent and progress to mentally defective.
It's a product of its time, and amusing enough to read once, but that's about it.
Someone decided it could be a series, and several more were published in the 80's. Harry was cut-and-pasting whole sections from one book to another. My SO defended Harry because she liked him (as do I), and the books were easy for him to write. I suppose, but I can't read them.
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Dennis