It's Tough Being a Sophomore

 

I've had Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson on my to-read list for a while. I finally got around to it, and I really enjoyed the book. It is about an orphaned young woman who inherits a claim in Montana from a long-lost uncle in 1918. The challenge is that Hattie has less than a year to finish proving up on the claim, meaning she has to build a lot of fence and grow crops when she's never done either. Fortunately for Hattie, she is surrounded by good neighbors. like Perilee and Karl Mueller, Leafie, and Rooster Jim. With their help, she gets the fence finished and brings her crops to harvest. In return, she helps the Muellers with their children (actually saving them from a herd of wild horses) and nurses the family through a bout of Spanish flu. Over the course of the year, she becomes part of the community. It's a nice, feel-good story.

However, this is during World War I, and not everything is feel-good. Karl is a German immigrant, and he faces a great deal of prejudice from some people in town. There is also a young rancher whose ranch borders Hattie's claim and who is the chair of the local patriotic defense group that is responsible for the harassment that Karl and others face. The reader is kept guessing until the very end whether he will become Hattie's love interest or the story's villain. It's a really well-written and enjoyable story that I finished in only three days (of course, it is a young adult novel....).

Since I liked the book so much, I jumped right in to the sequel, Hattie Every After. This story follows Hattie as she leaves Montana for new adventures in San Francisco. Through persistence and good luck, Hattie manages to work her way to the reporting staff of the city's main newspaper, the Chronicle, gaining a couple of kind of unbelievable "scoops" along the way. 

And that "unbelievable" part is where the sequel breaks down for me. A lot of pretty incredible things happened to Hattie in the first book (like the aforementioned incident with the wild horses), but the story is so invested in Hattie, and the reader gets inside her head so thoroughly that you really don't mind. The second book seems kind of rushed and yet also kind of empty. It seemed that there is a much more "tell" rather than "show" approach, and that Hattie just tells how she felt about things rather than letting the reader see through her eyes. A lot of the events are just TOO unbelieveable, really, and the career path that gets Hattie into the newsroom probably would never actually happen. There's also an underdeveloped plot that ends up being of major importance yet is just thrown in here and there throughout the story. To make a long story short, I wasn't really captivated by the sequel, but at least it ended the way I wanted (ha).

You see this pretty often in popular culture, where the first iteration of something is just really, really good and creative and well-executed, only to be followed by a sophomore effort that is forced and trying too hard to re-capture the magic of the original. No doubt about it, it's tough to catch lightning in a bottle twice!