So I think that the answer has to be structural rather than character- or plot-oriented. But that sort of “if you liked x, you’ll enjoy y” invitation really doesn’t require an actual connection between the characters. Perhaps it’s just a matter of letting readers know that if they liked the one book, then here’s another connected to it and therefore likely to offer similar pleasures. The first question, then, is, why has Schmidt bothered to suggest a connection between them at all? Why make this fairly slight but nevertheless obvious joining of one book to the other and then never refer to it again? Why might he have chosen to announce Okay as a sequel and thus invite readers to see it as related to a book about different people in a different place?) But Okay opens with Doug moving to another town, after which he has no contact with Holling, and there are no other shared characters or experiences. Doug Swieteck, the main character of Okay for Now, appears earlier in The Wednesday Wars in a relatively minor role as friend of its main character, Holling Hoodhood. Most basically, Okay for Now is, sort of, a sequel to The Wednesday Wars. first found in The Wednesday Wars, albeit perhaps to somewhat better effect. While Okay for Now, the more recent of the two, is about a different central character, it seems to repeat events,characters, situations, linguistic turns, etc., etc. But in fact they are even more similar than that–so very much like each other that beyond a superficial level of a different setting and such, there’s a surprisingly slight degree of actual variation or of anything significantly alternative. I need to think a little about these two books by the same author because they are enough like each other to operate almost as a set of variations on the same themes–as alternative versions of the same basic story.

children's and young adult literature (56).

Ok for now gary schmidt