Title: Doll Bones
Author: Holly Black
Illustrator: Eliza Wheeler
Publisher & Year of Publication: McElderry Books, 2013
Genre: Fantasy
Recommended Audience: Ages 10-14
Summary: Three twelve year old friends, Alice, Poppy, and Zach, take a thrilling adventure to solve the mystery of a doll known as the Queen. The Queen is an elusive doll that lives in a china cabinet, and is forbidden to touch by Poppy’s mother. Their journey to learn of the doll’s past also leads to self-discovery of how they are changing from children to young adults. After a suspenseful trip, the three ultimately discover the death of a girl many years ago and bury the doll in her hometown a few hours away.
Evaluation/Reflection: This book is filled with twist and turns, and is a hard to put down because you are always wondering what is about to happen. While it does have creepy story elements and intense moments, nothing gruesome happens is appropriate for preteens.
Illustrations: Wheeler has several black and white drawings that capture what is happening in the text; most have a creepy and eerie feel.
Review: In Holly Black’s newest middle-grade novel, “Doll Bones,” the main characters, Zach, Poppy and Alice, are at that intermediate stage between childhood and adolescence, when alliances shift and friendships subtly develop into something more, when children outgrow identities as quickly as they outgrow clothing, when boys and girls sometimes appear awkwardly patched together with emotional and physical features from various stages of development, like an evolutionary experiment gone haywire. For years, the three best friends have played a continuous, ever evolving game of make-believe embracing fictional kingdoms, characters and allegiances, using toy figurines and hastily assembled objects to stand in for the real thing. The Queen, a porcelain doll with vacant eyes and blond ringlet curls, presides over the kingdoms from her position in Poppy’s mom’s glassed-in cabinet.
But now, things are changing. Zach joins the basketball team. Alice has a secret. And Poppy is desperate for the game to go on, unchanged and unchanging. After Zach abruptly announces he doesn’t want to play anymore — a mixture of pride, humiliation and anger won’t let him confess to the real reason for his change-of-heart — Poppy summons her friends in the middle of the night and declares that there is one final component of the game. The Queen has come to her in a dream and revealed a terrible truth: the spirit of a little girl is trapped inside the doll’s body, and now Poppy, Alice and Zach must embark on a journey to put her to rest.
What follows has the cadence of a classic quest story, mixed with a shivery dose of the supernatural. The children confront villainous adults (a leering homeless man on the bus who warns them of aliens who might steal their faces; suspicious bus station employees; a well-meaning librarian who nonetheless tries to end their quest), endure mishaps and misfortunes, and engineer breathless escapes by boat and bicycle.
“Doll Bones,” the latest of Black’s books to meld the real, the gothic and the paranormal (she was a co-author of the best-selling series “The Spiderwick Chronicles” and has written several popular books for young adults as well, including “Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale”), doesn’t always flow or keep pace with its ambitions. Like the main characters, suspended between childhood and what comes afterward, the narrative sometimes feels unmoored, an uneasy mixture of ghost- and adventure- and coming-of-age story whose themes, and even intended audience, are occasionally muddled. The book, meant for ages 10 to 14, is almost certainly too frightening for readers younger than that, as the porcelain Queen, whose will the characters must obey, is made from the pulverized ash and bones of a little girl cremated by her potter father. But some of the characters’ attitudes, in particular their obsession with dolls, play and make-believe, might similarly leave cold the older middle-grade readers, as they oscillate between innocence and exhausted cynicism, prone to mood swings and lightning quick changes of temperament.
Of course, that’s precisely how children are at that age. And for the 10-to-12-year-old reader, dreaming of boys while still cuddling a teddy bear at night, or privately wishing to revert to the simplicity of childhood while enjoying the sensation of growing up, “Doll Bones” may be perfect. And if at times there is an uneasy tension between narrative elements, that’s probably due to the book’s ambitions: tackling themes of familial loss, the disintegration of friendships, the disillusionments of age and what it means to believe, this story is — despite its emphasis on adventure and a strong narrative that propels the book forward — the opposite of fluff. It’s a deep, strange and compelling book, at times lovely, at other times heartbreaking and deliciously weird. –Lauren Oliver, New York Times
Promotion Idea: This book would be good to promote during the month of October. Creating a bulletin board and book display of spooky novels for Halloween would be appealing for students.
Acquisition: Public library, Scholastic book fair, or available on Amazon for $14.21 (hardcover).
Author: Holly Black
Illustrator: Eliza Wheeler
Publisher & Year of Publication: McElderry Books, 2013
Genre: Fantasy
Recommended Audience: Ages 10-14
Summary: Three twelve year old friends, Alice, Poppy, and Zach, take a thrilling adventure to solve the mystery of a doll known as the Queen. The Queen is an elusive doll that lives in a china cabinet, and is forbidden to touch by Poppy’s mother. Their journey to learn of the doll’s past also leads to self-discovery of how they are changing from children to young adults. After a suspenseful trip, the three ultimately discover the death of a girl many years ago and bury the doll in her hometown a few hours away.
Evaluation/Reflection: This book is filled with twist and turns, and is a hard to put down because you are always wondering what is about to happen. While it does have creepy story elements and intense moments, nothing gruesome happens is appropriate for preteens.
Illustrations: Wheeler has several black and white drawings that capture what is happening in the text; most have a creepy and eerie feel.
Review: In Holly Black’s newest middle-grade novel, “Doll Bones,” the main characters, Zach, Poppy and Alice, are at that intermediate stage between childhood and adolescence, when alliances shift and friendships subtly develop into something more, when children outgrow identities as quickly as they outgrow clothing, when boys and girls sometimes appear awkwardly patched together with emotional and physical features from various stages of development, like an evolutionary experiment gone haywire. For years, the three best friends have played a continuous, ever evolving game of make-believe embracing fictional kingdoms, characters and allegiances, using toy figurines and hastily assembled objects to stand in for the real thing. The Queen, a porcelain doll with vacant eyes and blond ringlet curls, presides over the kingdoms from her position in Poppy’s mom’s glassed-in cabinet.
But now, things are changing. Zach joins the basketball team. Alice has a secret. And Poppy is desperate for the game to go on, unchanged and unchanging. After Zach abruptly announces he doesn’t want to play anymore — a mixture of pride, humiliation and anger won’t let him confess to the real reason for his change-of-heart — Poppy summons her friends in the middle of the night and declares that there is one final component of the game. The Queen has come to her in a dream and revealed a terrible truth: the spirit of a little girl is trapped inside the doll’s body, and now Poppy, Alice and Zach must embark on a journey to put her to rest.
What follows has the cadence of a classic quest story, mixed with a shivery dose of the supernatural. The children confront villainous adults (a leering homeless man on the bus who warns them of aliens who might steal their faces; suspicious bus station employees; a well-meaning librarian who nonetheless tries to end their quest), endure mishaps and misfortunes, and engineer breathless escapes by boat and bicycle.
“Doll Bones,” the latest of Black’s books to meld the real, the gothic and the paranormal (she was a co-author of the best-selling series “The Spiderwick Chronicles” and has written several popular books for young adults as well, including “Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale”), doesn’t always flow or keep pace with its ambitions. Like the main characters, suspended between childhood and what comes afterward, the narrative sometimes feels unmoored, an uneasy mixture of ghost- and adventure- and coming-of-age story whose themes, and even intended audience, are occasionally muddled. The book, meant for ages 10 to 14, is almost certainly too frightening for readers younger than that, as the porcelain Queen, whose will the characters must obey, is made from the pulverized ash and bones of a little girl cremated by her potter father. But some of the characters’ attitudes, in particular their obsession with dolls, play and make-believe, might similarly leave cold the older middle-grade readers, as they oscillate between innocence and exhausted cynicism, prone to mood swings and lightning quick changes of temperament.
Of course, that’s precisely how children are at that age. And for the 10-to-12-year-old reader, dreaming of boys while still cuddling a teddy bear at night, or privately wishing to revert to the simplicity of childhood while enjoying the sensation of growing up, “Doll Bones” may be perfect. And if at times there is an uneasy tension between narrative elements, that’s probably due to the book’s ambitions: tackling themes of familial loss, the disintegration of friendships, the disillusionments of age and what it means to believe, this story is — despite its emphasis on adventure and a strong narrative that propels the book forward — the opposite of fluff. It’s a deep, strange and compelling book, at times lovely, at other times heartbreaking and deliciously weird. –Lauren Oliver, New York Times
Promotion Idea: This book would be good to promote during the month of October. Creating a bulletin board and book display of spooky novels for Halloween would be appealing for students.
Acquisition: Public library, Scholastic book fair, or available on Amazon for $14.21 (hardcover).