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reviewed The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud (Lockwood & Co., #1)

Jonathan Stroud: The Screaming Staircase (2013, Disney-Hyperion) 3 stars

When the dead come back to haunt the living, Lockwood & Co. step in . …

Potato chips

4 stars

A fairly fun read. The world building is solid and engaging and the characters are well filled out and believable. The narrator is incredibly un-self-aware/unreliable in her descriptions of her peers/job/the world around her, which is mostly entertaining and makes the book more believable.

The one place where this rubs wrong is her descriptions of one of her friends who she really hasn't warmed up to in this book, and can be a little uncomplementary. By the second or third book, it's clear this was an authorial choice and the two warm up to each other (only to be supplanted by a new character the narrator initially dislikes!).