Doll Bones

Have you ever fallen asleep in your car after work and woken up at 2am at which point you go into your apartment and realize you're no longer sleepy so you read a Newbery until 5am? If so, let me give you some advice: Make sure under these very specific circumstances that you do not choose Doll Bones for your middle-of-the-night, alone-in-the-house pleasure read. Because while the title is fairly creepy, I can assure you that the book is far creepier.

Maybe if I re-read it now in the daylight surrounded by friends, I would sing a less terrifying tune. But I am willing to submit that the creepiest inanimate object in the world is a doll, and then let that doll have a terrifying back-story about being made out of the bones of a murdered girl named Eleanor who appears to the doll-owner in a dream wanting to be buried in her home-town cemetery and then let the ashes of said girl be in a little bag the doll-owner discovers inside the doll after removing the bone china doll's head and THEN let all adults see the doll and think she's a real girl and have the doll disappear and show up in random places where nobody put her and I challenge you to imagine something creepier.

I liked Doll Bones. I liked the well-developed characters and their sufficiently-developed families (well, I didn't necessarily like their families, but I liked their well-developedness). I loved the "game" Zach, Alice and Poppy played and how devastatingly it affected Zach when his dad ended it. I liked the complex themes and the connections the kids made. I liked how they changed and how Zach and Alice helped to allay Poppy's fears of change.

One of my favorite moments was Zach's reaction to discovering Eleanor's gravestone in the cemetery exactly as Poppy had dreamed it. Several negative experiences with his flaky dad had made him somewhat of a cynic up to this point in the novel. And then:

The large marble headstone bore the word KERCHNER on it, and over that, a carving of a willow tree. They stared at it, incredulous smiles giving way to genuine grins and laughter.

It made him feel, for a moment, like maybe no stories were lies. Not Tinshoe Jones's stories about aliens. Not Dad's stories about things getting better or things getting worse. Clearly, not Poppy's stories about the Queen [their name for the doll]. Maybe all stories were true ones.

Recommendation: Read it, just not under the circumstances specifically described above.