Filed under: art, feminism, writing | Tags: fatphobia, kid's lit, Lockwood and Co, middle grade, sexism, writing, writing for children
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 some reason, even though the story was clearly not complete after Book One.
Then the Netflix series came out and it was charming, well done, and smoothed out some things that had troubled me so I returned to the books, because I wanted to know what happened next.
As I’ve read them, the things that were somewhat slight irritants have gained more power, like a pebble in a shoe, moving around and getting more irritating. I suspect these irritants were why I stopped reading the books in the first place, even though there was clearly more story to tell.
The chief annoyance is how casually cruel this author is to several of his characters but especially one in particular. That character is called George. While George is much beloved by this team of ghosthunters, he’s also relentlessly teased. In the book I’m reading now, the team are on a field trip to a haunted village and no one wants to share a bed with George. I guess because he’s fat and they all find him disgusting? Over and over, he is the butt of the jokes, both in the narrative and the commentary of the narrator. The one that made me pick up my pen to write about this was, “And, in the far corner, it was either the world’s biggest salt-bomb or George’s bottom poking out from behind a crate of magnesium flares.” We know it’s George’s bottom there. Aren’t butts funny? Sure. But in this book, only George’s butt is the butt of jokes. Poor George. He is kind and smart, with incredible research skills and a brilliant scientific mind and he is always treated as the literal and figurative butt of this story.
And you know, I know that making the fat kid the joke is a standard comedy trope but it’s a hack move and not at all kind to this character or any fat kid reading this book. Whenever the author wants to lighten the mood of this scary ghost hunting story full of graves and violence and decay, he resorts to someone making fun of fat George. George mostly doesn’t seem to mind much but I honestly don’t think the author realizes that he could or should mind.
The story is narrated by a teenage girl who clearly has some feeling for her teenage boy boss (the titular Lockwood) and the narrative has a lot of “Will they or won’t they?” romantic comedy energy. But no one ever imagines she could have or develop feelings for George. It’s like he’s not a person, just a target for funnies.
And speaking of this Will They or Won’t They “romance“ between the leading man (boy) and the leading woman (girl), in the third book, a new female character is introduced and while they all fight ghosts, the real battle becomes which of these girls will get the boy. Lockwood. Not George of course.
This plot development with the new girl made me bananas because, sure, girls can be competitive and envious of one another but spatting over a man is such a man’s idea of what competition between girls is about. I appreciate that this guy wanted to write a girl protagonist – but this attempt to do relatable girl content was endlessly irritating. Especially since this girl of whom the protagonist is so envious is the first explicitly non-white character that he’s written – so it not only feels weirdly petty and misogynistic, it also makes the protagonist seem racist. It’s not so nice when I came in here to watch some ghosts scare everyone and then get defeated by a bunch of professional kids.
I’m sure the author feels like his little jabs at George, the fat one, are just a bit of comic relief – and maybe those “cat fights” between the two girls function the same way for him. Aren’t they funny spatting over nothing when we secretly know it’s all over a man? Even the heroine’s talking skull/ghost finds it hilarious and endlessly tries to instigate trouble between them. But I don’t find it at all amusing.
The thing is, of course girls can dislike one another and be jealous of one another’s bodies or style and they can, in fact, flirt with the same guy – but this is a pretty standard patriarchal trope. There’s only one girl and when another appears, they will compete for the same leading man. This is why a key piece of the Bechdel Test is that the conversation between women that lasts for longer than thirty seconds has to be about something other than a man. And the conversations between the girls in this book do technically pass the Bechdel test but because the narrator tells us her feelings, we know that the subtext is actually the man/boy. The handsome one with a troubled past, not the nice fat one everyone is disgusted by.
And now that I’m looking for it, I notice the erotics of slimness in the language about everyone in this world but George. And yes, yes, I know, the slenderness is key for a lot of people in understanding who the heroes are. “Even with his coat, his slim, spare form slipped through without difficulty.” Oh, did it now?
The thing is, this is all very normal. Lockwood and Company is far from the first story to utilize these patriarchal fatphobic tropes but do we have to indoctrinate kids with them so early?
It’s just so mean. Like, at one point, George is trying to understand a carving on a tombstone and it’s described as “He was tracing its shape with a chubby finger.” Why can’t he just trace it with his finger? His perfectly normal human finger. Meanwhile, Lockwood’s are “long, quick fingers.”
I am so tired of fat people being written as jokes, or worse, disgusting and/or evil. (So many villains are fat. In this book too. All the fat ghosts are especially terrible.) I am tired of women being pitted against one another. (The drama of the two girls is instigated by the two boys hiring the new girl without discussing it with the old girl. That, my friends, is a real set up.) Meanwhile, I think these books actually have something important to say about what kids can see and do that adults cannot. I just wish it could do that without throwing George under the bus or relying on sexist girl fight tropes. Maybe the next book will be better.
I’ve started it. It’s worse. In the first chapter, the author compares George to a beluga whale and not in a good way.
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