Saturday, August 16, 2014

Book 14: Lockwood & Co The Whispering Skull

Title and Author: Lockwood & Co. The Whispering Skull, by Jonathan Stroud (Uncorrected Proof Copy)

Illustrator: Kate Adams
Publisher: Disney Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group
Expected Publication Date: September 2014
Genre: Fantasy/Horror
Target Audience/Age Group: Kids
Part of a Series? Yes
Will the Reviewer Keep It In His/Her Library? Yes


This is the second book in the Lockwood & Co. series, the first being The Screaming Staircase. Reading this one makes me want to read the first because I liked the characters and the setting. I just want to read more about them.

I liked that children are the ones who read the supernatural and are valued for their skills. I liked the competition between a have-little firm and a have-all firm, each company having a leader who is good at what he does. 

I liked the opening scene, where the team of Lockwood & Co. find more supernatural than they expected when they're doing a job. The reader is immediately thrown into what these people do, and how they do it. It is everything I hoped for since we really enjoyed Stroud's Bartimaeus series.

I liked the cover–the skull in a jar is really creepy. It's the reason I picked the book from the selection given me. I didn't like the inside of the cover sleeve because it made no sense to me–I hadn't read the first book. Why do publishers do that? If I had gone by the sleeve instead of the cover art, I would have felt like an outsider who had no business picking this book up, much less reading it. I would have put it down and taken another book instead.

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