thestaircase

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Book Reviews and Synopses

The Staircase

Ann Rinaldi

Rinaldi, Ann. The Staircase. Gulliver Books. Orlando Florida. 2000.

The Staircase, by the author Ann Rinaldi, is a fiction book about that one room in your house, which your never supposed to go into when your a kid. The Staircase is a good book for younger readers.

The Staircase is a book about a girl named Lisa and her quest to find out what’s hidden behind a locked closet door. Lisa is a 15 year old girl who was always confused about how her parents felt about her. They were strict, not letting her do anything she wanted, and wouldn’t show any emotion towards her. From the ages of 4 to 14, Lisa would get up, go to school all day, come home at six o’clock, have dinner, and then go to bed. Lisa had just turned 15 and was tired of doing her regular super boring schedule. One night, Lisa had a very horrible dream of a woman screaming. She tried to find and help the woman who was screaming, but she couldn’t find her.

The next morning, Lisa passed a locked closet, she heard a faint scream, the scream oddly sounded exactly the same as the scream in her dream. Then the scream started getting louder. She didn’t know what to do, she looks at the door nob, there was a huge pad-lock, on the nob, which she had never seen before. Knowing that her parents were at work she slid into her parents room, which she had only once been in. She ran to her mothers closet and started to rummage around her mothers things. When she finally found a very strange shaped key with a very rusty handle. She runs back to the closet and fits the key into the pad-lock. She turned the key and the pad-lock came off, slowly she opened the door, to find a very long staircase. The staircase went up so high that she couldn’t even see the end. Lisa climbed the staircase for ten minutes until she finally saw some sunlight which she thought was very strange. Where was she?

When Lisa entered the light she realized that she has been here before, in her dreams. Then it came to her, this place that she would go to at the top of the staircase was connected to her dreams. Whatever she dreamed about would show up here. Every night, Lisa would climb down the staircase and go to sleep and dream about the most wonderful things, a cotton candy blanket, or to own her very own horse, those where the things that she wanted the most. One day she had a dream about having parents who would take care of her and wouldn’t make her have a terribly boring life. Like every morning when she saw her parents leave for work she ran up the staircase to the land that she could create. When she saw and met the parents that she dreamed about she forgot where she was, she suddenly became happy. There she was with people who cared about her. After that she never came down that long staircase. How could she miss an opportunity like this, to be with her parents who actually cared about her.

The end of The Staircase is tolerable, living with people who cared about her, getting to dream about whatever she wanted and for that to all come true in reality. This is a book that kids would enjoy because of the fun mysteries behind a closed door.

3 out of 5 stars

Contributed by A. Unger

January 11th, 2012