I read a fair amount. I especially like to read stories based on real-life events. I regularly hit the library and I troll the beta readers sub for such books (I am cheap, I don’t like to pay for books, not really in my broke-ass budget).
Over the years, I have read a number of books that try to switch perspectives, but these books are usually just a disaster, they are just never well done, or at least I have never before seen it done well. If the points of view are written by the same person, it reads like it. It doesn’t feel authentic. If they are written by different people, they are just too different to really compare in an apples-to-apples way.
So, I have recently read and fallen in love with Fall of the Guardians by Vanessa White, and was a beta reader for Fall of the Guardians II: The Book of Ericka by Ericka Brown (also fallen in love with). Each book is an incredible look inside the cult of the religious military school they went to, and honestly, I have not been able to stop thinking about them.
Now, on to what I want to discuss. The two books match but they don’t match and I am really wrestling with if this is the best or worst part of the books.
Things that completely match between the books are character names, location information, and everything about the general structure of how this school worked and how it generally ran.
A lot of the things that didn’t match left me with these hard-to-describe, very visceral feelings. The one that hits me the hardest is “Brother Mark.” In the first book, he was one of Vanessa’s villains, but also a shred of safety. Reading her book, I wanted to reach into the page and wrap my hands around his throat. It really comes across as that he and the girls in his bunk straight up tortured these two girls (Vanessa and her 4YO surrogate sister Jess) simply because they were so small.
In the second book, Ericka presents Brother Mark (and Vanessa’s entire bunk) in an entirely different light. That a mid-manager put these two very little girls into his bunk to just to blow it up, and makes (almost) everything he did look reasonable in the larger circumstances, and you clearly see how he did a lot of what he did to keep the other girls’ anger down so they didn’t kill V and J.
This particular contradiction in perspective has literally kept me up at night. But the books are filled with stories that both of them were part of, or that they played different parts in, and sometimes they agree, and often they don’t. Or you get one part of the story from Vanessa, and it seems like you have it all, then you get another part of it from Ericka you didn’t even think it existed, but it completely changes how you see Vanessa’s story. Not in a “she was wrong and she was right” kind of way, but it just seems to show more and you just end up seeing so much more of it.
The other thing I am not sure if I love or hate is that the diction is almost completely different between the two books. They have program-specific language (like how they use the term “bunk”) that is the same, but the general diction is just completely different, even though the format and structure of the two books is basically the same. It’s just not something I have really seen, and I don’t know how I feel about it.
When I sent an email to them about this via the beta readers, they only said they made the editorial choice to stay as close to each woman’s own story as possible, and that 30-year-old memories are bound to have discrepancies.
So, would the books be better if they matched like every other series I have ever seen? Should I suggest that?
Do you know of any other books that do anything like this, and do it well?
by Old_Broccoli_1948