And, by the same method, it's so damn satisfying when books DO lean into their premise:
Yes, exactly. I just went and took a quick look at my bookshelves, and then realized I'm probably not going to find very many dramatic examples of books that don't lean into it there, because I don't tend to keep them! As opposed to the ones I do hang onto and love and reread, which are bursting with all the potential of their premise. Watership Down: RABBITS RABBITS EVERYWHERE. Amber: Not without flaws, but you sure can't say the author doesn't use the premise of a dimension-traveling hero in a full-out war over the throne of a fantasy land to its absolute maximum.
I guess that series books can be all over the map with this ... most of the examples we have for books that miss the mark are later books in series that sometimes really nail it. Come to think of it, I wonder if some of the later Ben January books didn't work for me as well as the earlier ones because she's more consistently failing to do this, whereas earlier she generally embraced the details of whatever it was she was writing about, whether it was an opera company or a riverboat or a Mexican estate. The next book also really leans into its slightly bonkers premise in a satisfying way, come to think of it.
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Yes, exactly. I just went and took a quick look at my bookshelves, and then realized I'm probably not going to find very many dramatic examples of books that don't lean into it there, because I don't tend to keep them! As opposed to the ones I do hang onto and love and reread, which are bursting with all the potential of their premise. Watership Down: RABBITS RABBITS EVERYWHERE. Amber: Not without flaws, but you sure can't say the author doesn't use the premise of a dimension-traveling hero in a full-out war over the throne of a fantasy land to its absolute maximum.
I guess that series books can be all over the map with this ... most of the examples we have for books that miss the mark are later books in series that sometimes really nail it. Come to think of it, I wonder if some of the later Ben January books didn't work for me as well as the earlier ones because she's more consistently failing to do this, whereas earlier she generally embraced the details of whatever it was she was writing about, whether it was an opera company or a riverboat or a Mexican estate. The next book also really leans into its slightly bonkers premise in a satisfying way, come to think of it.