Review: Where the Staircase Ends

Review:

I found myself disappointed with this book. The concept was a really interesting one, the idea of the staircase and the girl going through memories of her life was what drew me in. However, I found myself pretty much hating the characters.

The plot started out fairly interesting, The main character, Taylor, arrives at school to find everyone talking about her, and her best friend, Sunny disses her in front of everyone. She's freaked enough to call her mom to come and get her. Right off the bat I did not like Sunny. Sunny is supposed to be this rich beautiful girl everyone admires, but frankly, she was a horrible person. A complete bitch. Almost right off the bat she coins the phrase "douche-fag" to describe one of the geeky smart boys she doesn't like and it becomes like her signature insult. i pretty much checked out at that point. I hated Sunny. She's rude to her friends, she randomly picks on people she decides she doesn't like and tries to make it seem funny when she passes rude notes bullying the overweight girl in one of her classes. She even went after the boy she knew Taylor liked and made it seem like it was no big deal and acted all hurt when Taylor got pissy with her. I did not get why this girl is so popular.

Though to be fair, the tone of voice is fairly realistic for high school mean girls who drink and party. Taylor herself didn't impress me much as a main character for the most part. She likes one guy, Justin, but since he doesn't seem to be interested she starts dating another boy, Logan, who is interested. Taylor though, doesn't seem to get it when Logan gets annoyed at her for hanging around Justin a lot. 

Taylor gets hit by a car and finds herself stranded somewhere where there is a massive staircase seeming to lead to nowhere. Heaven? Hell? God? It's impossible to tell. it does raise some fairly interesting philosophical questions as Taylor stars climbing the stairs and is confronted with past memories. And we learn more about her life and her friendship with Sunny. Taylor and Sunny have been friends since second grade and Sunny has a pretty rotten home life. Her mother left when she was young and her dad has never handled it well and is pretty much away on business all the time. In Taylor's flashback memories there are glimpses into the past and all the times Sunny has been a good friend and Taylor is pretty much all she had. Sunny wasn't always such a horrible person and she's had some shit to deal with, but she was still vile as a best friend in later life. I have absolutely no sympathy for her as reader. 

Taylor reviews some of the evens in her life, she's at least smart enough to be sorry for the pranks and bullying she took part in when Sunny picked on the overweight girl, but its like too little too late. There were a few times when the boy Taylor really liked, Justin, was pretty much the smartest character in the book. He's not impressed with Sunny, for one thing. (Yay for him, listen to him Taylor!) He's a very honest person and tries to help Taylor see things as they really are.

Sunny turns on Taylor and the nasty rumours start flying about her. Taylor is devastated. she's forced to confront some painful memories and has to figure out how to deal with them. She has plenty of issues with her parents, mom in particular for what she thinks is being too strict and setting too many boundaries. But where this is concerned she did show some remarkable character growth. 

Though by the end I still wanted to throttle Taylor.

The concept was a pretty good one, and the writing itself was fairly compelling. Some really good scenes with Taylor and the staircases and the things she's forced to deal with. The characters with one or two exceptions, were pretty much appalling people. 

While this book wasn't to my taste in the end, I would certainly like to read something else by this author.

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