The Mystery of Locked Rooms

In The Mystery of Locked Rooms, Lindsay Currie explores how challenges can spur emotional growth through the characters of Sarah, Hannah, and West. Each of these friends struggles with a different emotional issue, but through their adventures in the funhouse, the children each experience emotional breakthroughs as they open up to one another and deepen their connections and their friendships.

At the beginning of the novel, each of the Deltas is going through personal difficulty. Protagonist Sarah fears taking risks, the result of a lack of control over her family’s situation, like their financial hardships and her father’s disability, that makes her wary of taking chances or relying on luck. Hannah struggles with her confidence and self-esteem after she failed out of dance school the previous year. West also battles a lack of self-esteem because of his extraordinary memory: “I’m tired of it […] It’s not just that I can’t forget things the way a normal person does. It’s that once people figure out that I have a different memory, they make a huge deal of it” (125). Although Sarah and Hannah praise his ability, their attention still makes him feel self-conscious and uncomfortable.