The Screaming Staircase

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This is the first middle grade book I've read in....a long time. Like a long, long time. I always read ahead of my peers when I was in school, so I was out of middle grade by like...5th grade? Either way, it doesn't matter, not really. I picked The Screaming Staircase up simply because I'd seen the TV show and wanted more of the characters. (And not to mention that I absolutely loved Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus series.) Well, color me absolutely not surprised at all because I loved this book.

Look, if you need a break from the adult world and want something that's funny, charming, and sometimes quite spooky, this is what you want to read next. Stroud stretches his writing chops here creating a whole parallel world to ours that is plagued with a huge problem: ghosts are coming back from the dead and killing people. For some reason, only children can see (and fight) the ghosts. Adults just...die. Stroud sets this world up quickly and without any impossibly huge info dumps – everything you need to know is given to you in bite-sized pieces between everything else.

Our heroes are Anthony Lockwood, a rather mysterious young man who owns his own ghost hunting/fighting business. George Cubbins – a large boy who focuses on research and irritating everyone. He was quite annoying, but not enough to degrade my experience of the book. Lucy Carlyle, whose POV the books are told, is a girl who is running away from a horrible experience. Together, they try to solve a murder-mystery. Is it predictable? Maybe a little, but you have to remember who the audience is, and well, predictable does NOT mean badly written. It didn't lessen my enjoyment of this book at all to know where it was going.

This was so much fun. I'm absolutely going right onto the next book in the series.