The Hollow Boy Review

The Hollow Boy is the third book in Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood and Company series. Stroud is an excellent author and the series has been a lot of fun. There are some great things about this book: there are some more interesting ghosts, the team is up and running now so they routinely handle more impressive ghosts than we have met in the past. The ghosts are in more interesting places, in the past they have mostly been in large creepy old houses, we have those here too but also some small houses and more retail venues. I like that the ghosts are branching out some. The conspiracy is growing. In the other books there were indications that there was a larger conspiracy wrapped up in the Problem but we have had little information on it. The characters are starting to notice the clues that we already have. The skull gets to talk more. The skull is funny; shockingly perceptive, but funny. We get some more characters and some more depth to the ones that have been fairly peripheral until now. As the series works on pressing out into a larger world for plot it needs a larger cast. Developing the cast now so we care about them is excellent planning. Things that the book doesn't have going for it: there are feelings. Lots of feelings, and the heroine is shockingly unselfaware for someone who picks up on the feelings of dead spirits that are completely imperceptible to everyone else. The title is disappointing. The first book played with the title we kept looking for the screaming staircase the whole way through and were usually wrong when we thought we had found it. The title of the second book blatantly obvious, there was a skull that talked. I felt like this book was trying more for the intrigue of the first title but didn't deliver as well. The final ghost show down. I felt like it was both anticlimactic and incomplete. The buildup was good and delightfully creepy but I failed to connect  with the peril of the "boss" ghost, to use a mario term. Also I feel like everything else we know about ghosts tells me that their way of neutralizing the "boss" ghost was not effective and that they should have more problems with the situation. Finally, the reviews on the book jacket proclaim praise for the end of the trilogy. I felt profoundly disappointed in the lack of resolution at the end of the book. Then I noticed that it was praise for the completion of the Bartimaeous trilogy. While I am very glad that this is not the end of Lockwood and relieved that Stroud did not just lose his story telling mind and decide this was a reasonable resolution, it is clear that the next installments will be braving new territory, which could be great. I look forward to finding out.