Why We Adore Book Series
We’re no strangers to book series. There have been numerous series to capture our hearts: The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, The Wizard of Oz, Anne of Green Gables. However, the books I’m talking about today are part of a different category of serialized books. These are the books that you spent many weekend hours trying to collect, searching for that one you were missing, hoping to finish a complete set.
These books don’t need to be read in a specified order. Sure they’re numbered, but only to hook us collectors and make us feel incomplete if the books on our shelf don’t follow the perfect sequence. No, each title is a new adventure with familiar characters and they create a certain kind of charm that we still can’t resist.
The lessons are oh-so-important. The Sweet Valley High series steered young girls through every possible high school drama. Those books prepared you for the future. Check out some of the titles: Bossy Stephen, Sweet Valley Slumber Party, Left Out Elizabeth, and Danger: Twins at Work. No doubt there are valuable lessons in those pages.
They are all about finding a niche. These books didn’t follow trends. Oh no. They made them.
Take Animorphs for example, a science fiction series about five kids who can turn into any animal that they touch. Pretty nifty, huh?
The characters are our best friends. If you think you get to know a character in 300 pages of a book, then you’re wrong.
You don’t really know a character until you read about them in 132 different titles (that’s how manyThe Baby-Sitters Club books there are, not including “special” volumes).
You always know what you’re going to get. If we wanted to read horror, a copy of Goosebumps was always waiting on our bedside table. The title – and cover art – told us what we were up against. Plus, we had read enough previously to know that things would always work out in the end, no matter how creepy the sponge under the kitchen sink. (Seriously. It Came from Beneath the Sink! is about a living “sponge”/monster that lives under the kitchen sink.)
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Maria Vicente is a literary agent intern living in Ottawa, Canada. She likes coffee, books, snail mail, and magic. You can find her on Twitter (@MsMariaVicente) or check out her website (mariavicente.com)
