Series Fiction

Schrodinger and I discussed fantasy series tonight. I told him about the books I fell for when I was in fifth grade (The Seven Citadels series, by Geraldine Harris). They had maps of imaginary places, and pull quotes from made-up religious texts at the start of each chapter, which were almost a whole additional novel in themselves. Ms. Harris limited herself to four books, but the school library had only two of them. The town library had the third. No one had the fourth. No one at all. The school library finally ordered it sometime in my sixth grade year, but it didn't actually come in until I had moved on to junior high. I didn't find a copy of book 4 until the summer before high school.

The last sentence of book three was "In the morning, the ships of Fangmere caught them." I was on that cliffhanger for three years.

This was back when I was the ingenuest of all ingenues, of course, eons ago, when a year between books was a long time. Three years on that cliffhanger was excellent practice for waiting for the fifth Harry Potter book, and barely a warmup for Game of Thrones in print.