Did you think there were too many characters?

Use this forum to discuss the December 2019 Book of the month, "E-M-P Honeymoon", by Dorothy May Mercer
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silvafaerie
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Re: Did you think there were too many characters?

Post by silvafaerie »

I did not think that there were too many characters. But, I did think that there was not enough time to fully develop each character. I felt that each character was pretty equal as far as being part of the story line. I have seen other people saying that some of the characters are from previous books. So, maybe it would help if we had read the author's other books? I usually like when characters from past stories connect with new characters. It didn't work for me in this instance.
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Post by Hannalore »

I don't feel like there are too many characters. The book is well balanced.
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Post by xoxoAnushka »

Letora wrote: 27 Dec 2019, 10:20 It seemed like the further along I read into E-M-P Honeymoon, the more characters were introduced. I thought the main characters would be Tom and Kelly, but they seemed to fade into being secondary characters as the story progressed. In fact, I'm not really sure who the main character was because there were too many. I couldn't really attach myself to any one person because there wasn't enough information on any of them. Did you think there were too many characters?
Yes, I can feel you. There were really many characters (even lagging character development) that sometimes it feels disoriented.
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Post by Aditi Sapate »

So far, I think the focus is on Tom, Kelly and Su-Jin. Maybe there are more characters introduced later, but I do still feel connected to the present characters.
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Post by Letora »

Aditi Sapate wrote: 26 Jan 2020, 02:21 So far, I think the focus is on Tom, Kelly and Su-Jin. Maybe there are more characters introduced later, but I do still feel connected to the present characters.
How far have you gotten in the story? It will branch out to a lot more characters. I wish it had stayed on Tom, Kelly and Su-Jin.
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Post by Crazycutie »

I understand the need for so many different characters because each one did have a main part, however I felt that the characters didn't always have the right explanation. Some characters I felt had a bigger part like Jung Lo that played a major part in the war head fiasco, but I didn't get to know him like I wanted to. Then there were other characters like the assistant that did the phone calls for the President, I felt like it was giving me his life story when we just needed to know he was an assistant. So I think it goes both ways.
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Post by YoshaP »

I did not feel like that the number of characters was bothersome, though if I want to give everyone involved an equal amount of space in the book I would probably not put the name of Kelly and Tom on the cover. With everyone getting an almost equal amount of space in the book, I feel there was not enough time to develop the relationships between the characters in a way that the reader relates to them.
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Post by Melchi Asuma »

I think that dedinitely the book has too many characters. I am only a few pages into reading it and already I can see that too many characters are being introduced.
MA
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Post by Faithmwangi »

On matters quantity of characters, I don't believe they were many just underdeveloped. This made it difficult to attach myself to any one character. Also I expected more detail on Tom and Kelly as they were the ones on honeymoon.
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Post by Laura Ungureanu »

I would've definitely preffered if there were fewer characters. Keeping track of them gets difficult.
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Post by Tars »

Personally I like it more than focusing story on only main characters. This way readers have much more details, interesting facts and perspectives on going ons.
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Post by Julianna »

Too many characters... yes. It kept me on my toes. I wish the author went more in depth on certain characters. Instead, I felt underwhelmed and left wondering.
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Post by MirageParul »

I totally agree with you! There were too many characters in the first few pages itself. I found it unnecessarily confusing.
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Post by steffielara95 »

Unless you are a very skilled author, it's always risky to introduce too many characters and risk them falling into caricatures...especially with such an action-filled plot, having a stronger emotional anchor for the reader would have given the book greater impact
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Post by tsh1001 »

Yes, there WERE too many characters! I think the problem was, the author was not focusing enough on DEVELOPING the important characters and was over-introducing unimportant characters. For example, do we NEED to know the first name, last name (sometimes hyphenated), AND title of ALL CHARACTERS?? Even the ones who are only mentioned once?

In my opinion, Mercer made a point to introduce everyone too formally and never made a point to develop the characters who matter to the story. Thank you for bringing up this point.
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