Book Review: Lockwood and Co:The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud

How do you feel about ghosts?  How about adventure and sarcastic banter?

The Screaming Staircase, by Jonathan Stroud, is set in a modern day London where ghosts stalk the night, and only children and teenagers can see them clearly. Our heroes Anthony Lockwood, Lucy Carlyle, and George Cubbins run a psychic detection agency. That is, they hunt and destroy ghosts. But unlike most other agencies, they don't have any adult supervisors. Since adults can't see or hear ghosts very well, Lockwood thinks they just get in the way.  Lucy tends to agree, given her unpleasant past.  George hates everyone equally.

We meet Lucy and Lockwood as they prepare to banish what they think is a routine ghost.  The ghost, and the case itself, prove too hot to handle, and Lucy and Lockwood barely escape.  Unfortunately, the Lockwood and Co. Psychic Detection Agnecy finds itself in some trouble with the law, and Lucy, Lockwood, and George are forced to take on a dangerous case in one of the most haunted houses in England.  The last team that tried to clear the historic mansion of ghosts died; every last one of them.

I enjoyed all the action and adventure, as well as the smart mouth comedy in the face of creepy, deadly ghosts.  Hope you will too!

Happy reading!

~ gothbrarian

Book Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Although technically this book is considered "Adult Fiction", as many of Neil Gaiman's books go, the reading audience is much wider than the over 18 crowd.  If you haven't read "Coraline" or even his picture book "Crazy Hair", run into the closest Children's section of a library as soon as you can!  What makes him so enviably gifted I think is that you always hear the authentic voice of NG in whatever he has written.  He doesn't change his language or alter his world view to accommodate young'uns, tweens, minors OR majors.  While he can be many things, he is always recognizably himself, a rare talent indeed.   In "The Ocean at the End of the Lane", Gaiman gives us a dark fantasy with all his usual elements--a bit of gore (there's this worm...),wry humor (the Hempstock women) , unexpected terror (near drowning by parents) and the built-in compulsion to read all night because you have no idea how it will end!

Where there is no imagination there is no horror--Arthur Conan Doyle

I am not a big horror fan.  It's either way too nightmarish and scary or so gruesomely over the top that I'm bored.  But since I am in the mode of "expanding my literary horizons", I decided to read Andrew Smith's The Marbury Lens.  And I have to say that it didn't take long before I was absolutely freaked out--the book jacket says "Sixteen-year-old Jack gets drunk and is in the wrong place at the wrong time" but that doesn't begin to describe the terror of his kidnapping and torture at the hands of a sexual predator named Freddie (way creepier than Krueger).

Tucson Festival of Books Author Spotlight: Jacqueline Woodson

If you like realistic fiction about teenagers with problems, like Crank by Ellen Hopkins or Monster by Walter Dean Myers, you should pick up something by Jacqueline Woodson. You're in for a treat. She'll be a guest speaker at the Tucson Festival of Books this year, which is a huge gathering on the U of A campus to celebrate books, authors, and reading. Here's their page for teens.              

The first book I read by her was If You Come Softly. It's a sad, kind of Romeo and Juliet-esque story. Jeremiah's black, and Ellie's white. They meet at a private school and fall in love without being prepared for how society views their relationship. On her website, she writes that it was inspired by a poem by Audre Lord, which begins:

If you come softly  

as the wind within the trees

you may hear what I hear 

         see what sorrow sees.

A Teen-Approved eBook

Okay, yeah, I admit that sometimes it's hard to find a good teen eBook that doesn't have a ton of holds on it already. Here's one that shows up under the regular fiction eBooks that I bet you'll love, though: When I Found You by Catherine Ryan Hyde. It's based on a short story called "The Man Who Found You in the Woods." Listen to a podcast of that story here. (If you don't want to read it on your computer, phone, tablet, or eReader, we also have some of her other books in the regular print format, including the one that inspired the movie Pay It Forward.)

I've done this special event for teens called Story Talk a few times now, first with our teen volunteers, and then with some inmates at the Juvenile Detention Center. It's kind of like a short story book club: we read a story out loud and then discuss it. This story has been one of the favorites both times: it starts with something straight out of the headlines: a man finds a newborn baby abandoned in the woods in the dead of winter.

Flights of Fantasy

The best part about anthologies and short story collections is finding an author you wouldn't have encountered otherwise.  And then devouring everything else that author or artist has ever written.  So pick up a copy of Flight, any of the volumes, and dive in.  There's something for everyone in this collection of indie comics edited by Kazu Kibuishi. 

The library has several comics by artists who've contributed short stories to Flight.

A Deadly Serious Cat and Mouse Comic

Maus, by Art Spiegelman, was the first graphic novel I ever read. I was about twelve, I think, and I snuck it out of my brother's collection of comic books. There was just something different about it that caught my interest: it was a real book, heavy, with binding and a hard cover. Yeah, it was a comic book. But it wasn't like the Spiderman or Superman comics that I'd glanced at and found boring. It was a new way to look at a sad, serious subject: the Holocaust.

Edgy Reads

I was going to do a best-of-the-year post, but when I looked back at the teen books I read in 2011, I realized that most had something in common: they were pretty dark and disturbing. Dark content in YA literature got a lot of press this year, but in the end, it's a personal decision. If you're searching for books that push the envelope and give you that unsettled, is-this-really-okay-to-read feeling, give these a shot!

• After by Amy Efaw is the raw, unflinching story of the person behind the headlines:  Devon did something terrible, something so bad she can't even quite remember or believe it, even in her cell in juvie, where she has all the time in the world to reflect.

The Walking Dead, at Your Library

No question about it, zombies are hot right now. Here are a few notable zombie books I've read recently.

Ever since the first teenager walked the earth, adults have been the enemy. Now it's even more literally true, when a strange virus has turned everyone over sixteen into mindless cannibal monsters, leaving kids and young teenagers to fend for themselves in an increasingly desperate fight. It's not for the faint of stomach, but for those that like their zombie movies both gory and thought-provoking, The Enemy and its sequel, The Dead, by Charlie Higson are a sure bet.