School of Fear
by Gitty Daneshvari
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gitty DaneshvariEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-09-01
ISBN: 031603326X
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780316033268
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of School of Fear
Book Review: Quirky. Very, very quirky. And annoying.
Summary: 2 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I picked this book out because I liked the cover art (That's right -- I judge books by their covers. What's it to ya?) and I decided to read it because I very much liked the concept: I thought a lot could be done with the idea of getting a group of children to get over their fears. I was hoping to see some basic psychoanalysis, some exploration of where phobias come from, and some depictions of various ways to get over them. I was hoping that, since this is a children's/YA book, the exploration of phobias and their treatments would be basic enough for me to understand, and also fictionalized and imaginative enough to keep me interested.
Unfortunately, what the author seemed to want to do was show, over and over and over again, how strange and quirky someone can be when he or she has a severe phobia and lives in an imagined world. Two-thirds of this book was descriptions of the characters' quirks, their strange behavior and appearance and obsessions based on their pathologies; unfortunately, each character is fairly flat and simplified, and so the descriptions of their eccentricities become very repetitive, very fast. The worst part is that when the phobias were insufficient to make the characters wacky enough, they were simply given wacky and eccentric traits, just because.
There are eight main characters if you count the dog (and I do). Four of them are the kids with their phobias: Madeleine is afraid of bugs, Lulu is claustrophobic, Garrison is afraid of drowning, and Theo is afraid of death. Then there are the three adults in charge of the School of Fear: Mrs. Wellington, the headmistress; Schmidty, her handyman and major domo; and Munchauser, her lawyer. Mrs. Wellington's beloved bulldog, Macaroni, is the most likable of all of these, mainly because he's just a dog who eats too much. With the rest of them, it got extremely tiresome to read about Madeleine's constant overuse of bug spray, and Garrison's copious sweating (inserted presumably because he could not freak out about large bodies of water at all times), and Lulu's annoying sarcasm and eye-rolling (Again, her claustrophobia is not general enough for her to be dealing with that all the time, so instead she says "Whatever" in almost every conversation. and yes, that is like many teenagers, but these are not realistic characters, and if you want to include one example of verisimilitude -- why that one? Whatever.). The worst, though, were Theo and Mrs. Wellington: Theo because he is made obnoxious in every way, whiny and weak and also precocious and very, very precious. He's a 17th century fop reduced in height and given a morbid fascination with death, and he is the most vocal and therefore the central linchpin of the phobic students. And all he does is whine, whine, whine.
The reason Mrs. Wellington was equally obnoxious as a character is that she stood in my mind for everything wrong with the School of Fear itself. Because she was obsessed with beauty pageants. Not fear, not dealing with fear, not teaching children, not even the money she is paid for her services: beauty pageants. And Casu Fragizu -- maggot cheese -- which she loves so much that she insists that every piece of food she eats be flavored with maggot cheese. Yeah, it didn't make sense to me, either, but there's that wackiness for the sake of wackiness. She calls the kids "contestants," and makes every piece of advice connect to being a beauty queen. She wears prodigious amounts of makeup, yet she allows Schmidty to put it on her for no good reason other than a vague joke about the old man's poor eyesight, and because it makes Mrs. Wellington quirkier. You'd think a woman obsessed with her own beauty, and a lifetime of beauty pageant experience, would wear makeup well, but apparently she's too quirky. Munchauser suffers the same fate: he is shown in the beginning of the book as the scariest, most ruthless lawyer imaginable -- it is he who keeps the School of Fear secret, by threatening legal action against anyone who whispers a word of it in public. But when he appears, he is a destitute compulsive gambler who talks about nothing but betting and trying to wheedle his way into Mrs. Wellington's fortune.
Oh, and then there's Abernathy. Mrs. Wellington's sole failure, the one child she could not make better (Apparently therapy with a beauty pageant theme couldn't reach this one child. All the others, though -- works perfectly.). That's all I can say about him, because even though he appears twice in the book and is talked about several times in very ominous tones, there is nothing else that happens concerning him. He's her failure. That's it.
So much time is spent on the characters that the plot suffers; there's a weak twist at the end, but the resolution of the phobia treatment is a thorough letdown. Really the most interesting part of the book was that every chapter starts with the official name of a phobia, and after reading this book, I'm glad to know that I have hydrophobia and mottephobia. And that's all I'm glad about.
After all of that, I must add that some people will probably think the characters are funny, and in that case, they will probably like the book, because the characters are almost the only thing in it. So if you like reading about wacky characters in wacky situations, maybe you'll enjoy this one more than I did.
Summary of School of Fear
Everyone is afraid of something...Madeleine Masterson is deathly afraid of bugs, especially spiders.
Theodore Bartholomew is petrified of dying.
Lulu Punchalower is scared of confined spaces.
Garrison Feldman is terrified of deep water.
With very few options left, the parents of these four twelve year-olds send them to the highly elusive and exclusive
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