Poor Emily!

The star of the 1990 novel, The Stepsister, Emily may live in a nice house on Fear Street and she may have a cool sister and a boyfriend who specifically dumped he sister so that he could date Emily (yikes!) but Emily has still had a lot of tragedy in her life.  When she was a little girl, she could only watch helplessly as her father drowned in Fear Lake.

Now, Emily is a teenager and her mother has married a guy named Hugh Wallen and everything sucks!  Hugh is a bit of a jerk, the type who brags about how happy he is to have two new stepdaughters who can help to clean the house and who refers to his family as being a harem because there’s so many women in it.  (DOUBLE YIKES!)  Hugh also gives his son, Rich, a hard time because Rich likes to read books.  In fact, Rich is a huge Stephen King fan.

Perhaps the most awkward thing about Emily’s mom marrying Hugh is that Emily now has a stepsister named Jessie.  Jessie is the type who complains about the house, complains about Emily’s dog, complains about how Emily’s biological sister has red hair (and trust me, that totally turned me against Jessie), and who will probably steal everyone’s boyfriend as soon as she gets a chance.

But is Jessie capable of murder?

That’s the question that Emily has to solve because there are strange things happening around the house, from fires getting set to innocent animals getting killed to peroxide being put in shampoo bottles.  Emily overhears Jessie on the phone, saying that “I really could kill her!’  Is Jessie being literal or is she just venting her frustrations?  When Emily reads in Jessie’s diary that she was once accused of being involved with a murder, does that….

Wait, wait, wait, WAIT!  Emily is reading Jessie’s diary?  Not cool, Emily!

Seriously, Jessie has her issues but it’s not as if Emily is the most accepting of stepsiblings.  I mean, it’s one thing to get upset because Jessie doesn’t like her dog or because Jessie makes fun of her room and her clothes.  That’s totally understandable.  Jessie seems to have issues with people with red hair so, as far as I’m concerned, Emily shouldn’t even say hello to her when they pass on the street.  But to then accuse someone of being a murderer just because you resent the fact that your mom was dumb enough enough to marry their father …. that’s going a bit too far!

Well, no worries.  Things do work out in the end.  The wannabe murderer is discovered and all of the siblings work through their issues and try to be nicer to each other.  Yay!

This book was interesting for me to read, just because after my mom and dad got divorced, I was always worried about what would happen if my mom remarried and I ended up with some stepsibling moving in with us and basically getting in the way.  I would be nice to them now but seriously, I was a brat when I was 13.

Anyway, this book was okay but it was also one of those Stine books where you could easily guess who the murderer was, just be eliminating all of the obvious red herrings.  There wasn’t really a lot of suspense to the book but I appreciated the somewhat realistic portrayal of a family trying to figure out how to adjust to their new situation.