Luckily, my dilemma illustrates the problem with sequels: the passage of time.
The conclusion I've come to upon finishing the second high-stakes suspense youth fiction trilogy I've read in recent memory (the first being The Aldous Lexicon, which began with A Crack in the Line) is that it's never a good idea to start out by promising more than one book. Why is this so?
Well, because no matter what you do, each book is its own distinct entity. Odds are that most writers will finish the first book, then spend ages editing the heck out of it, and finally begin work on the next one. On further drafts, though, the original intent of the book changes, a central theme comes forth which the writer may not have expected, and the thing ultimately becomes more and more cohesive.
And if, as a writer, you intend to continue the story past the point where you deliberately ended it at the end of one volume, that's not being fair to your creative sensibility. You're forcing yourself to work within boundaries, basically, and so your story will stagnate.
All this leads up to my review of Monsters of Men. The intention of this book is to wrap up all prevailing threads from previous installments. What will the protagonists do about the army banging down their front door? Do leaders of factions have any amount of good, or integrity, in them? Will Todd and Viola stay together, even after being split up yet again?
Bear with me on this theory, but a lot of these threads sound like the author pulling plot out of his ass. Example: there's a problem with metal bands affixed to women. There were no such problems implicated earlier in the series, and their solution comes quickly and arbitrarily near the end of the story.
There is exactly one bit of good done from this event, and it's this: further characterization of the Mayor. And he's only characterized more fully to get a better idea of the "Chaos Walking" theme (that is, the idea of men walking around with their thoughts open to the world). And this is the only point on which Monsters of Men really succeeds: by introducing creatures who have lived with this ability for generations, the reader is treated to the full implications of being able to read everyone else in a society. To which I say: well done, Patrick Ness (the author). As with The Underwood See, I feel like you've successfully wrapped the idea you first presented in The Knife of Never Letting Go.
But I wish you'd done that earlier, and mostly because of the writing style. Seeing, reading, and hearing about wars has made me feel many emotions, but rarely has it made me feel as irritated as in Monsters of Men. Ness has carried over the style of very brief chapters from The Ask and the Answer, this book's direct prequel. In The Ask and the Answer, this style made sense, because the book was about an eternal conflict and stalemate between two groups. But here, even though I see the conflict continues, it just gets annoying to read the same events from three different perspectives. Where The Knife of Never Letting Go had momentum, this book stalls and takes steps backwards.
Other annoying things: ending most paragraphs with a dash, to imply suspense when there isn't any; huge redundancies of prose, even though there should be some due to us hearing people's thoughts; ending each chapter on a cliffhanger. It's the kind of thing I'd expect from a Dan Brown novel, or from Peter and the Starcatchers. I was so bored I even did something I promised never to do again: I peeked at the ending to see if anything got more interesting.
Which leads me to my final point on sequels: if you write something as a direct sequel, while central themes may change, ideology will not. Monsters of Men ends on an ambiguous note; so did the first one, The Knife of Never Letting Go. The first Harry Potter book ends on a light and hopeful note, with the feeling of a return to normalcy. (SPOILERS.) So does the last Harry Potter. It boils down to this: given a similar situation, the author will end the story in a similar way. It's like fate.
So now that I've complained yet again, is there any hope for sequels? I believe so, because there are sequels that are good, or that establish themselves as separate entities from their predecessors (or both). The Lord of the Rings is the famous tale that "grew in the telling" as a direct sequel to Tolkien's The Hobbit. The second Star Wars movie (The Empire Strikes Back) succeeded largely because George Lucas stepped away from the director's position. The Narnia novels appear to be an exception to the rule of ineffective or inconsistent sequels, which may have been due to (A) Lewis's singular and strongly-held Christian ideology and/or (B) his insistence on treating each book as a separate entity. Note that Lewis never promised seven books, unlike J.K. Rowling's recent series, which (I felt) degenerated somewhat by the final book. Sequels hold promise for people who want more of the same, which will unfortunately not generate the same creative spark in the author that the original did. The best course of action, then, is to find a new book, and leave the author alone to his/her own devices, to come up with a new story.
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