Songs For The Struggling Artist

After I finished writing my novel for kids, I realized I was not particularly well versed in what kids were reading these days and so set out to read all the contemporary middle grade fiction I could get my hands on. Top of my list: The Secret Keepers, The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, The Bromeliad Trilogy, The Girl Who Drank the Moon and Miss Ellicott’s School for the Magically Minded. There’s a lot of great stuff out there. And they tend to be real page turners compared to a lot of adult books. One of the books I encountered on my search was The Screaming Staircase, the first book of the Lockwood and Company series. It takes place in a world where children work as ghost hunters because adults can’t see spirits. It’s somehow both Victorian and contemporary and has the charming quality of being a workplace story for kids. I know the youth love a ghost and here kids can see them and hear them and fight them every night. I liked it. In theory. But I wasn’t compelled to read more than the first one for