Multiple Points of View
I feel like the great majority of books I read are usually just one character's point of view, be it third or first person. Sometimes it's two, you know, heroine and hero. Those are all fine and dandy, but what about when we add in a third, fourth, sixth, eighth point of view. When does it get to be too much?
Now granted, in Six of Crows, six points of view really worked out better than I thought it would! The characters were more or less in the same vicinity of one another, worse came to worse, they split up in pairs or whatnot and we hop around between the pairs. It was never overly complicated to follow along.
But let me tell you, there have been times in other books where it was seriously friggin hard to figure out which of the 4 or 5 points of view we were dealing with because there was no helpful chapter title telling you so. I actually sometimes hate it when that happens, because it usually takes a few lines for some sort of hint to come along. Characters don't go around thinking their own name!
I honestly can't remember which of the books I've read had the most points of view. Very few can make them work. Another series that had multiple points of view of a number I can't even remember was Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguie's Wicked series! Of course, every book I think of is one that's buried in storage somewhere so I can't recall if there were helpful chapter titles for this one, but I felt like you knew within the first few sentences whose point of view you were reading.
I have nothing against multiple points of view. I actually like them from time to time. It's fun to see what the heroine was thinking when event A happened and we were with the hero at the time. That's why when Jennifer L. Armentrout went back to the Lux series and wrote the first three books in Daemon's perspective, I knew I had to have it because who didn't want to know what Daemon was thinking in those early times? Having the remaining books be a dual point of view with Katy and Daemon just made the series twice as good! Lol.
Another series that did extraordinarily amazing with multiple points of view was Morgan Rhodes' Falling Kingdoms series AND her Spirits and Thieves series--you know, the ones that DESPERATELY DESPERATELY needs its finale?! Having the various points of view in this one lets you know exactly what's going on on all the fronts. It's a series where a lot happens and one point of view so wouldn't have been enough!
So in the end, I guess I have nothing against multiple points of view. I like them as long as the author does it in a way that you can quickly know whose point of view you're in. If I have to read more than a paragraph to figure out who's talking or whatever it tends to irritate me because I might think it's character B as that was the perceived pattern but it ended up being character D because there was no helpful chapter name title or whatever! Basically, if a book is to have more than one point of view, I feel having the chapters named with that point of view goes a long way to making readers happy!
How do you feel about multiple points of view? Do you like them? Or do you prefer just the one perspective?
