This review was contributed by CAROLYN HOWARD-JOHNSON award-winning author of This is the Place and Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered.

Carolyn Howard-Johnson is a columnist for the Pasadena Star-News and writes movie reviews for the Glendale New-Press. She is also the author of This is the Place a coming-of-age story about a young journalist who finds the courage and vision to lead a life she had never imagined. The prologue is available by sending an e-mail to: carolynhowardjohnson@sendfree.com

REVIEW

For an author, trilogies are trying. That’s sometimes true for the reader, too. The first book has to have an ending but not so much of one that the reader won’t want to follow the characters they have learned to know on to the next book. The author faces the same task with the second. How do they do it?

A Light in the Window is Jan Karon’s second in a series is a good example to study. It was originally a trilogy, but is now a series, perhaps because Karon does serialization so well.

One of her secrets is that she has compelling characters. That is not to say that all trilogies must be written around endearing types like those who dwell in Mitford, N.C., but one’s reader had better feel a strong attachment to them.

If a story can’t have a tight ending, with all the pieces carefully turned up into a perfectly sewn hem, then at least it had better have a satisfying premise. In this one Karon explores fear in general and fear of commitment. That’s a nice, modern and age-old, emotion and, if the fabric seems a little unraveled at the end, then that’s what these kinds of feelings usually do to lives.

Karon is also adept at writing each book so that a reader won’t need to read her books in order. She carefully refers back to the incidents in the book before. She unobtrusively brings the reader up to date without lobbing several paragraphs or pages at him until he is either bored or loses track of the story at hand.

The editions I am reading use one other technique effectively. They include the first chapter of the next book in the series. If the reader should be vaguely dissatisfied with the ending, it won’t matter because she’s off and running on the next installment. Jan Karon (and her editors?) knows what they’re doing with a series. If you’re planning one, there’s a lot to learn in the pages of the Mitford Series.