Folio Books: Review of Goosebumps No. 57

Goosebumps® No. 57: My Best Friend Is Invisible

by R.L. Stine

A Parachute Press Book, published by Scholastic Inc.

July 1997

An eleven-year-old fan told me about the series. She says they're the only books she likes. The bookshop had a whole shelf of them, of two different kinds. First there are the straight Goosebumps® stories, with 56 titles listed in the back of the book, this present one being No. 57. There could be more by now. The bookshop also had several "Give Yourself Goosebumps" titles, with "20 different scary endings in each book!" -- in the style of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books which I have never been able to read. A closer look revealed that nearly all the books in the shelf were of this second type, so the choice of Goosebumps No. 57 was made by default. All those I looked at were narrated in the first person, a technique with well-known limitations.

The story is about a character called Sammy whose parents are research scientists and whose brother Simon is a goody-goody type who never gets into trouble. Sammy finds himself in one pickle after another because of Brent, an invisible boy who has come to live in Sammy's room. Sammy's friend, Roxanne, insists on investigating a supposedly haunted house for their school science project and you can imagine the kinds of things that follow.

I enjoyed the story. It didn't scare me, not the least little shiver, but it was entertaining, and I read it through at a sitting. There were a few funny parts, but the "twist" ending seemed to me silly and unconnected to the body of the story (other readers think it's the whole point).

The title is a puzzle. The invisible boy is not Sammy's best friend or any kind of a friend. He gets Sammy into trouble at every turn. Sammy can't get rid of him, and nobody believes that he exists. Roxanne isn't much of a friend either. Do kids care about such things?

The virtues are a general harmlessness and the fact that children like the books. I would certainly stock at least some of them in a school library, much as I stocked the maligned and under-rated Enid Blyton; though in the horror category, for primary or elementary school libraries, one would have to judge each title on its merits. It stands to reason that children's libraries should carry books that children like, with the caveat that it's part of the librarian's job to screen specific titles and exclude those that might cause harm. (I'm thinking of the effect of a seriously gruesome or frightening book on a nervous eight-year-old. The trouble is that once it's read it's too late; you can't "unremember" something. Less squeamish children can always buy such books themselves.)

The type is big, much bigger than an Enid Blyton "Secret Seven" book for a similar age group printed some fifteen years ago. Which brings up the matter of age group. Enid Blyton's Secret Seven books were targeted at young readers aged about seven up. Children naturally grew tired of them somewhere between nine and twelve and moved on to other things. The point is, they did move on. During those years Enid Blyton was an invaluable bridge to mature reading, in part because of her huge output and the fact that children liked her. For comparison I read Secret Seven on the Trail right after Goosebumps No. 57. It, too, features a deserted tumbledown house. Details early in the story turn out to be significant later. The children use their brains to solve a mystery concerning a railway yard and the mechanism and reasons for switching trains from main lines to sidings (now I know why trains mysteriously stop for half an hour in the middle of nowhere). The characterization is minimal but there is some. Overall it's an interesting story with a well-worked-out plot and some vivid atmospheric detail, and yet she was severely criticized in her day for mediocrity and a limited vocabulary. Her books were at times excluded from children's libraries based on a perceived lack of literary merit.

I believe that children's views on books should be respected. It was my impression when running a children's library that the better readers liked Enid Blyton. You could almost breathe a sigh of relief when a child chose a Famous Five or a Magic Faraway Tree book and came back next day for more. The ones I worried about were those who found her boring -- the trouble was, many of these children found everything boring, they didn't read at all (we had plenty of books to choose from, I should add). The Enid Blyton fans were always, without a single exception that I can recall, willing to try other writers as well, and were by then able to understand and enjoy them -- E. Nesbit's books, for instance, or one-off classics like The Wind in the Willows or The Otterbury Incident, all part of a smooth transition to adult reading which can begin as early as nine.

Incidentally, Enid Blyton appears to be out of print in the U.S. Another observation from my own experience, her books were a total failure for reading aloud, in contrast to their striking success in promoting independent silent reading.

This isn't where I'd intended to go with the Goosebumps No. 57 review. But the point stands. Enid Blyton guided young readers into novels, long stories which took hours or days to read, with suspense and mystery and entertainment (and not too much emotional agony). The knack for parents and librarians was to introduce other writers gradually, building on a child's evident pleasure in sustained private reading. Though there is no similarity in the subject matter, Goosebumps No. 57 is about the same length as a Secret Seven and about the same level of difficulty (or easier, with the larger type and more single-sentence paragraphs), and by all accounts the series is very popular with young readers. More power to R.L. Stine if the Goosebumps books are getting kids to read and away from the TV.

Order Goosebumps No. 57, My Best Friend Is Invisible, by R.L. Stine, 114 pages, Scholastic Inc., US$3.99; Amazon price at time of writing $3.19, 20% off

GOOSEBUMPS is a registered trademark of Parachute Press, Inc.

See also An editorial on Goosebumps and school libraries in Ed's Internet Book Review.

M.A., October 14, 1997

Goosebumps® No. 57: My Best Friend Is Invisible