Aw, COME ON! or How To Irritate Me After First Vastly Entertaining Me (teehee)

So I just finished a most amazing book – A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. Most Amazing Indeed, she said. It had all the things I love – great characters, a strong heroine (who dramatically underestimates her own strength but pulls it out whenever she needs it), a new and interesting spin on supernaturalness, history, libraries, whispers of time travel, a sentient house, a deeply-involved plot, mystery, suspense… You name it, the book had it.

I fell in love from the first pages.

As I read on, I got pulled further and further into her world. As I read on, the story got more and more involved, with new characters, sub-plots, and drama. As I read on, I started to get nervous – how on earth was she going to tie anything together or bring any resolution about in the remaining one hundred, then fifty, then ten pages? And then it hit me (sometimes I’m kind of slow): she wasn’t.

DOH!

Turns out this is the first book in a new trilogy.

Bah, she said!

Now anyone who knows me (or has read what I’ve written about series and/or long books) may find that shocking to read, because such a person knows that normally the fact that there will be more books/story is a grand and glorious thing to me. And normally it is. And by “normally” I mean “when said additional books/story are already or very-nearly available”. I actually don’t like it when I have just discovered the first book and fallen in love and then learn that I have to wait two or more years to see more of my love…

This first book came out in February of this year; Ms. Harkness’s website talks about the next book in the trilogy being available in 2012. But amazon.com doesn’t even have a title yet, let alone a publication date. That doesn’t bode well for me, because usually amazon gets a book listed months and months in advance. Which suggests that I will not be able to see what is in store for our fearless (mostly) heroine and her dashing vampire for quite some time.

UGH, she said!

On one hand, patience is a virtue; I don’t want an author scrambling to pull a story together just to make a publication deadline or to get a book on store shelves. You can tell when an author has done that – been pushed to get the next book out on a timeline that obviously was not the author’s own. Those stories always feel stilted and false. I certainly don’t want that to happen here. This is a great book and the rest of the books in the trilogy deserve to be developed and nurtured carefully so that they too are great. BUT, simply put, I also don’t want to wait years and years to read them!

Patience may be a virtue, but it is certainly not one I have in spades (or clubs or diamonds or anything). On the plus side, I will definitely get to reread this book soonish, because the story was so involved that I will no doubt have to reread it before going on to the next volume to make sure I don’t miss anything. That is a good thing. On the minus side, I don’t know when I will get to do the rereading/going on.

Ah, the uncertainty!

Still, I’m not for a moment sorry that I read the book now. It was amazing and engaging and I was lost in the story from the get-go. I wouldn’t undo the reading of it, even if the undoing meant that the other volumes would be available for sequential reading. I am simply not a delayed gratification kind of girl. But I do hope that Ms. Harkness writes much faster than I do, because I really want to see the next two books both come out next year! 🙂