Review: The Vanishing Stair

The Vanishing Stair by Maureen Johnson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After the cliffhanger ending of Truly Devious, I was pretty eagerly awaiting this second book of the trilogy to keep the mystery going in both the past and the present. I've finally read The Vanishing Stair, though, and I feel a little bit disappointed in the end result. Though I think that might have been Maureen Johnson's point, as this series draws so much inspiration from Agatha Christie that it would be very surprising if anything here actually played out in a way that the reader can easily predict - and that includes being overwhelming as opposed to underwhelming. But that underwhelm, I think, is because it's now more obvious than ever that this whole trilogy is a single book stretched out to three with a heavily padded story and too many characters taking up space. Even Janelle and Vi, a sweet f/nb couple (whereas the first book waffled a bit on Vi's enby identity, here it's beyond clear that they and their pronouns and gender identity get due respect), simply feel like a distraction, and the Greater Scope Villain that is Edward King simply lurks in the background, managing to do even less than President Snow in the Catching Fire book (after all, the movies make it easy to forget that Snow was actually a little less omnipresent in the source material.) And even more so than the ending of the first book, this one just feels like a total non-ending, chosen arbitrarily to split this from the upcoming third and final book. All in all, the generally creepy atmosphere and well-appreciated diversity of the cast are positives enough to keep me recommending this series - and to bump up the star rating to three instead of two as is my immediate instinct - but unless the third book is an epic finale, I'm going to be incredibly disappointed that I had to slog through this one to get there.

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