Let’s talk about how fairly often a trilogy happens, and we can delve into some of the issues based off of that. The creator of the story has an idea for one story, maybe more, but one that they know they can get published or produced. So they go to the publisher or producer and sell them on this story and they get it made. Now, it’s a huge success and the publisher or producer comes back to them and asks for more and not just one more, two more of the story or film or whatever it might be. So the creator creates another story picking a spot in the middle for a cliffhanger between both stories and then those are published or produced. However, the second and third don’t do as well. What went wrong?

Now, it could be that there just wasn’t anymore story to tell surrounding certain characters or ideas or even worlds. That can happen, but probably isn’t going to be the biggest issue. Probably as often it happens that the creator didn’t have any more stories to put in that setting and to get something a little bit more out there published or produced, they agree to a multi-thing deal which includes what they are actually interested in creating as well as two things that will be more successful for the company that they signed the deal with. Both of those examples, there really shouldn’t have been a second thing created at all, because there really wasn’t anywhere to go.

But, I think there’s another issue that often befalls trilogies, and that’s their ability to tell a complete story. Pirates of the Caribbean is a great example of this. In the first movie, we get a complete story, we get Jack going from being a pirate down on his luck, getting what he thought he wanted, realizing it wasn’t what he wanted, and overcoming everything in the end. Same with Star Wars: A New Hope, we get a complete story including third act metal ceremony. Then comes along the second film, in particular in Pirates of the Caribbean, less so in the original trilogy (Star Wars). You get the creators knowing that there will be a third film, so they tell part of a story. You get some build, maybe even some change, but in the end, the biggest issue still hasn’t be resolved. Instead, you have to wait for the third film. And that’s fine, if you can watch both films back to back, but most of the time if it’s something you’re really excited about, you’re seeing the film or reading the book when it comes out, not when both are out. So you get the second part which is the start of a story and ends with a small resolution, and the third part which is the continuation of the second part and then the final resolution. So combined you are telling a single story, but both parts are going to leave you feeling a little wanting, unless they are masterfully crafted.

So, how can you get around this in a trilogy? Sometimes you just plan on it being a trilogy. Lord of the Rings is a prime example of this, Fellowship of the Ring doesn’t tell a complete story, Frodo is still going to Mordor, the same with The Two Towers, Frodo is still going to Mordor, and that’s the end of the story (kind of, there are a lot of third acts) when he throws the ring into Mount Doom in Return of the King. However, in each of those, we know there’s the through story line going on with Frodo getting the ring to Mount Doom in Mordor, but we also have other characters getting a story as well and there’s story, especially in Return of the King and The Two Towers that gets told apart from Frodo’s journey that has groundwork laid in earlier books, but finishes up and tells a story there. We have the massive battle between the forces of good and evil in Return of the King which sees Aragorn become King. We have in The Two Towers multiple stories that are told and wrap with Merry, Pippin, and the Ents and the battle of Helms Deep.

Lord of the Rings does two things that should be pointed out. It has a through line so it doesn’t feel like the parts of the trilogy are disconnected. This is the Frodo and Sam story line that they need to get the ring to Mordor and Mount Doom. It’s the key piece of the story and in fact, if they fail, the whole thing fails and that runs throughout all of the books. At the same time with have Gandalf, Aragorn, Merry, Pippin, Gimli, and Legolas doing there own things, making a difference in another part of the world. And even though they aren’t carrying the end game thing, the ring, they still have an important part to play. So we get complete story arcs, from beginning to end, for them in the books and not across all the books, but in each book there is a beginning and ending point.

This varies from my Pirates of the Caribbean example because it has a through line throughout the whole thing, Pirates has characters who repeat but the first movie stands separate from the last two of the original Pirates trilogy. And Lord of the Rings has a beginning, middle and end to each book, versus Pirates 2 & 3 where you have a beginning and middle and a middle and end split respectively.

What does this mean as a creator?

First, a trilogy isn’t the end all for writing, you don’t need it to be a trilogy. The Dresden Files, a series that I love, is on book 17. So you can clearly go longer if you have more story to tell, so don’t let a trilogy limit you. And don’t let the idea of it needing to be a trilogy or anything like that force over complexity and bloat into your stories.

However, if you are going to write a trilogy, or even if you are writing something that you have a bigger idea for, but you just need to get one written and published first, think about through line and think about a complete story. Now, it’s hard if you think that you are only going to get a single shot at creating your idea, but give yourself room. Don’t bloat your idea to fit everything in to a single thing, instead, tell a nice complete story and leave room in the world for there to be even more story. Star Wars, the original trilogy, does this well. You have them blow up the Death Star, that by itself could end the story in A New Hope, however, Vader isn’t killed, so the villain is still out there. If nothing ever came after A New Hope, it wouldn’t feel like it’s missing anything, but it’s natural that we pick back up again with Darth Vader and the Empire. So create a first story, even if you don’t know that you’ll get more like that. Give the main characters a big win but leave a villain out there defeated but not destroyed. That way, you can come back and pick up with the same characters and continue a story.

Also leave plenty of your world unexplored after your first story, especially if you don’t know if there will be more. Lord of the Rings, we get through some mountains, but we know that Mordor is still out there, but we’re not there yet, and there are other lands to explore as well that we haven’t seen or gone to. Star Wars: A New Hope, they really aren’t that many locations and then they have a ton of other planets that they can create and use in future films because they didn’t have them hop from planet to planet all the time. This gives you room to create more mystery and more adventures in which to tell your complete adventure. Pirates of the Caribbean really feels like it hits up so many locations in the first film, even though it’s somewhat limited, so you don’t feel like there are a lot of players left to join the story in this small world they’ve created, as compare to Lord of the Rings and Star Wars where who knows what new enemies or allies might be out there.

Now, I’m sure there are more things out there that you can do when creating a trilogy. I do want to wrap up with that I’m not trying to bash on trilogies. I think fairly often they can work. The original Star Wars trilogy and Lord of the Rings are great examples of this. Even The Hunger Games, which I didn’t talk about much, does a good job of making the 1st and the 3rd stand separate as their own stories. But don’t limit yourself to that if you want to create an epic, and tell a complete story each time, those are just my rules for writing a series or trilogy.

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As one glance at the book cover will tell you, Chemistry is a parody of Twilight, but with zombies this time instead of vampires. Or at least, that’s how it started out — as the author notes in her Goodreads profile, she set out to write a book that was the exact opposite of Twilight, and the characters took on a life (er…undeath, in some cases) of their own. What is on its surface a goofy satire of Twilight that plays for laughs is in actuality a book with more depth, heart, and well-rounded characters than I’ve chanced across in quite some time.

Our heroine is Stella Blunt, a tall, curvy, brash, and supremely confident junior in high school. After Stella’s mom gets her dream job, Stella is forced to move across the country (Canada, in particular) with her parents, to Vancouver, British Columbia. To Stella, the move might as well be the end of the world — to say she doesn’t make friends easily is a vast understatement, and she dreads trying to fit somewhere into an unknown social sphere. At first, it’s just as bad as she fears — the students at her new school bully her relentlessly from the start (not that she puts up with it in the slightest, but this doesn’t even seem to slow them down). But then, she comes across Howard Mullins (known by all as Howie) in her chemistry class, and life as she knows it changes still further.

As soon as Stella sits down beside Howie, he can’t keep his eyes off her. His relentless yet unassuming adoration intrigues Stella, and she forms a tentative, curious friendship with him. She discovers that he is unfailingly sweet, if a little slow when he hasn’t eaten in a while, and full of an old-fashioned charm the likes of which she’s never seen. His pallid complexion, monotone voice, and lurching gait confuse her at first, so she does some research — and finds out that Howie, along with his father, brother, and sister, are all zombies. They eat brains (from animals only, of course) and inject themselves with formaldehyde on the reg in order to stay functioning/semi-normal, and to keep the virus from progressing or making them contagious. Naturally, Stella finds this beyond strange, but by the time she finds out, she’s gotten to know Howie well enough to know that he’s a rare gem, virus or no virus — and that she’s crushing on him, hard. Love quickly blossoms between them — but will it be enough to carry them through all the dangers and difficulties that lie ahead?

As I mentioned, this book is indeed a parody of Twilight, but to limit it to that would do it a disservice. More than just a feminist response to Twilight, Chemistry is a compelling feminist work that can stand on its own two feet. Thus, to my thinking, reading Twilight before reading Chemistry is only necessary for deriving maximum enjoyment from the jokes throughout the book — certainly not for enjoying the book as a whole. Not only does the story take every potentially questionable part of Twilight and stand it on its head, as well as elegantly fill in every plot hole that tripped up Twilight, its characters understand what feminism really is (i.e., what true equity, agency, and respect really mean) — and it manages to communicate this without sounding preachy, which was refreshing as all get-out.

Beyond this, the characters in this book are just fantastic. I believe we’ve noted in past reviews that there seems to be a trend among a lot of fiction these days where the protagonist of the story is totally flat and uninteresting, while being surrounded by loads of great side characters, all of whose stories we’d much rather read than the main character’s. So much of the time (especially with stuff that’s written in first-person POV), the protagonist is nothing more than a benign lens through which to view the story happening around them. That’s definitely the case for the material Chemistry is inspired by, and it’s something I’ve run into more times than I care to count. Because of this, finding a protagonist who actually feels like a real, multi-faceted, actually interesting human being in a book that I expected to be all goofiness and absurdity, well — it blew my tiny little mind, you guys.

And Stella, magnificent as she is, isn’t the only great character in this story. Howie is an absolute delight (beautiful cinnamon roll too good for this world, too pure), and is the kind of sweet, respectful, capable male protagonist I want to see way more of. Almost all of the side characters have a compelling persona and backstory, everybody’s motivations feel well-founded and understandable, and the majority of them go through some level of believable character development.

As much as I could continue gushing about this book for ages, I do have a couple of critiques — the most prominent one, for me, was the way Stella’s new classmates take to brutally bullying her right away. Like, they are instantly peppering her with fat jokes and mean, snide comments. Now, it’s been a little while since I was in high school, so maybe the memory is slightly less seared onto my brain, but it seemed a little implausible coming from students who didn’t know Stella or have any sort of history with her. I’ll grant you that kids can sometimes be jerkwads for no reason, and for the purposes of this story, it worked okay, but it felt like a lot to swallow at some points. This behavior is partially explained by the fact that Stella draws attention not so much because she’s tall and plus-size, but more so because of the sheer force of her personality (which is considerable). Basically, her peers are threatened by her way of owning whatever room she walks into, so they lash out at her. This goes some distance toward explaining why Stella’s classmates are so hostile, but it still felt over-the-top to me at times.

Another thing I noticed is that the reader is sometimes asked to suspend disbelief just a smidge too far, or sometimes a moment goes a step past the point of no return in terms of cheesiness. These moments are few, and easily forgivable in the larger scheme of the plot, but there were a couple of points where it was enough to give me pause and pull me back out of the story a bit. But then I reminded myself I was reading satire, and that it all serves the larger purpose, and I dove back in to the amazingness.

Lastly — and this isn’t a flaw so much as a heads up — the content often veers toward the very mature (swear words and sex talk and violence, oh my!) — I didn’t find it too much to swallow, but some readers might, and it was enough that I’d be hesitant to call this book a straight-up Young Adult novel, even though it’s billed as such. I would maybe recommend it to a mature 17- or 18-year-old, but that’s a pretty hard maybe. Basically, use your judgement–if this sort of stuff tends to be a bit much for you, approach with caution.

Despite these things, though, I pretty much enjoyed every minute of this book. The powerful combination of fantastic characters I wish I could befriend in real life, a ton of refreshing themes, and a pace that doesn’t let up, this book was exactly what I wanted to read right now, and nearly impossible to put down. It had so many of the tropes and themes I want to see more of, like the soft action boy (listen, I know this is barely a thing, but I’m trying to make it a thing, so there), the BBW, great platonic friendships, and some really great, non-token-y representation. Basically, it did a lot of the things I love to see a story doing, and beyond that, it was a straight up blast, and I already kinda want to re-read it (and I definitely want to do fan art of it).

After finishing Chemistry, I was beyond stoked to find that History, the second book in the series, is out now too, and I promptly devoured it as well (I may do a separate review of it later, but I’m still deciding…with the way it plays out, it’d be a challenge to review it without dropping some major spoilers, and I am morally opposed to spoilers). There’s a third book, Biology, in the works as well, but Chemistry just came out in 2016, and History in December of 2017 (fresh as fresh gets, y’all!), so needless to say, it’ll be awhile. And I shall be waiting with bated breath until it’s out!

Love or hate Twilight, would you read Chemistry? If you’ve read it, what did you like and/or dislike about it? What popular book would you love to see someone do a parody of?

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