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A review by sbbarnes
The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud
3.0
Right off the bat: This is a very fun book, and a super quick read. I didn't find it at all scary, but I am also not really the target audience - a) I'm in my twenties and thus jaded and sarcastic about everything, b) I'm really not that into ghost stories as a whole. Thus the three star rating; if you're really into ghosts this is definitely the book for you, no matter how old you are.
The book follows Lucy, Lockwood and George, who have an independent agency that chases ghosts and deals with hauntings; there are a number of very prestigious and wealthy competitors, run by adults. But adults can't see or sense the ghosts the way younger people can, and thus these teams often involve the blind leading the sighted but incredibly young. In this book, the team deals with the ghost of Annie Wells, and along the way, with the horrors in an incredibly old and haunted mansion, including the titular screaming staircase.
My issues are as follows:
1) Fridge horror. Following what I said about being too old for this, this is maybe a common thing in YA lit but it's really at its peak here. See, mostly, YA esp. in the SF/F genre has this tradition of kids being involved in really dangerous situations; in this book it's basically the whole set-up of ghost-hunting because adults can't sense the ghosts. So kids do it. There are several explicitly stated examples where adults screw up by being nominally in charge and kids get killed because of this. It's...really gross, honestly, because the adults still control judiciary etc. and there isn't even any justice for this. So there's a little too much child death and endangerment for me in this book, as well as the fact that none of the characters are over 18 and totally fine without adult supervision because adults suck. I've really gotten over this for multiple reasons, number one being that especially young readers go out of it with not a single example of a trustworthy adult in these books, because all the adults are terrible. I'm not a huge fan of the message that you can't trust any adult.
2) Rampant fatphobia. I really strongly dislike the way this book talks about George, who is described as a) plump, and b) always eating. Way to play to stereotypes. There's so much time wasted on Lucy - the narrator - talking about how fat his butt is. About how many donuts he eats. Leave the poor guy alone, Lucy, no wonder he doesn't like you.
3) Lockwood. I really didn't like him. He was arrogant and incommunicative. I felt like Lucy and George had way better chemistry than Lucy and Lockwood, but the mentioned fatphobia got in the way of that. I see very little redeeming in a relationship between two people who barely communicate with each other, especially when they're both still teenagers and in an employer-employee relationship.
4) They are clearly going to get older and age out of being able to hunt ghosts at some point and that doesn't sound like fun.
Sorry if I sucked the fun out of this. I doubt I will read the following books, because of the mentioned issues and the fact that it's just not my thing, but it seems they will at least tackle the issue of where the Problem is coming from, which would solve the whole kids-adults thing, and maybe the aging-out thing.
The book follows Lucy, Lockwood and George, who have an independent agency that chases ghosts and deals with hauntings; there are a number of very prestigious and wealthy competitors, run by adults. But adults can't see or sense the ghosts the way younger people can, and thus these teams often involve the blind leading the sighted but incredibly young. In this book, the team deals with the ghost of Annie Wells, and along the way, with the horrors in an incredibly old and haunted mansion, including the titular screaming staircase.
My issues are as follows:
1) Fridge horror. Following what I said about being too old for this, this is maybe a common thing in YA lit but it's really at its peak here. See, mostly, YA esp. in the SF/F genre has this tradition of kids being involved in really dangerous situations; in this book it's basically the whole set-up of ghost-hunting because adults can't sense the ghosts. So kids do it. There are several explicitly stated examples where adults screw up by being nominally in charge and kids get killed because of this. It's...really gross, honestly, because the adults still control judiciary etc. and there isn't even any justice for this. So there's a little too much child death and endangerment for me in this book, as well as the fact that none of the characters are over 18 and totally fine without adult supervision because adults suck. I've really gotten over this for multiple reasons, number one being that especially young readers go out of it with not a single example of a trustworthy adult in these books, because all the adults are terrible. I'm not a huge fan of the message that you can't trust any adult.
2) Rampant fatphobia. I really strongly dislike the way this book talks about George, who is described as a) plump, and b) always eating. Way to play to stereotypes. There's so much time wasted on Lucy - the narrator - talking about how fat his butt is. About how many donuts he eats. Leave the poor guy alone, Lucy, no wonder he doesn't like you.
3) Lockwood. I really didn't like him. He was arrogant and incommunicative. I felt like Lucy and George had way better chemistry than Lucy and Lockwood, but the mentioned fatphobia got in the way of that. I see very little redeeming in a relationship between two people who barely communicate with each other, especially when they're both still teenagers and in an employer-employee relationship.
4) They are clearly going to get older and age out of being able to hunt ghosts at some point and that doesn't sound like fun.
Sorry if I sucked the fun out of this. I doubt I will read the following books, because of the mentioned issues and the fact that it's just not my thing, but it seems they will at least tackle the issue of where the Problem is coming from, which would solve the whole kids-adults thing, and maybe the aging-out thing.