Sometimes an author’s debut novel or their first novel in a new series is just awesome.  You fall in love with the characters, the world-building and the author’s writing style and you’re so eager for the sequel that you can hardly wait.  You try to make sure your expectations aren’t too unrealistic but you do expect that the second book will be the same high quality as the first…except it isn’t.  The writing is trite and full of purple prose, the characters do total 180s and seem to have completely lost their minds and the world-building is revealed to be shaky at best.  It’s the curse of Book 2 Syndrome!

This happened to me most recently with Captive by Aimée Carter.  Pawn had an unique premise, decent characters and a plot that just kept me guessing.  But the sequel Captive was absolutely awful.  Where the main character Kitty had been a smart if relatively naive main character who generally knew when to keep her mouth shut, in the second book she just would not shut up about anything.  She kept smart-mouthing everyone, revealing important secrets she could have kept for leverage later and just generally having a bad case of verbal diarrhea in order to move the plot along.  It was just awful and is one of the best examples of Book 2 Syndrome I’ve ever seen.

What I want to know now is this: Have you ever had a really bad book sequel experience?  Whose book was it and why was it so awful/disappointing?  Or, if you haven’t ever been disappointed by the second book in a series, what was the most disappointing sequel to a movie you’ve ever seen?

Let me know in the comments below!