the Queen

I read the book Doll Bones by Holly Black... mostly because of the creepy cover. I have always been afraid of old, china dolls... especially when they come to life.

But, Doll Bones was actually a wonderful book about the power of storytelling and creativity... with just the right amount of creepy thrown in for good measure.

For middle grade readers who are struggling with the pressures to leave childhood behind, Doll Bones explores the idea that storytelling shouldn't be given up. Creativity is just as important for teens and adults as it is for children.

So, of course, I loved it.

From GoodReads:

Zach, Poppy and Alice have been friends for ever. They love playing with their action figure toys, imagining a magical world of adventure and heroism. But disaster strikes when, without warning, Zach’s father throws out all his toys, declaring he’s too old for them. Zach is furious, confused and embarrassed, deciding that the only way to cope is to stop playing . . . and stop being friends with Poppy and Alice. But one night the girls pay Zach a visit, and tell him about a series of mysterious occurrences. Poppy swears that she is now being haunted by a china doll – who claims that it is made from the ground-up bones of a murdered girl. They must return the doll to where the girl lived, and bury it. Otherwise the three children will be cursed for eternity.

Favorite Quotes:

If they were real, then maybe the world was big enough to have magic in it. And if there was magic - even bad magic, and Zach knew it was more likely that there was bad magic than any good kind - then maybe not everyone had to have a story like his father's, a story like the kind all the adults he knew told, one about giving up and growing bitter.

He had read lots of stories where heroes succeeded in spite of long odds, where they accomplished a task that everyone else had failed at. He wondered for the first time about all the people who'd gone before those heroes, about whether they'd been heroic too or whether they'd been at each other's throats, before everything had gone wrong. He wondered if there was a point where they realized they weren't going to make it, weren't going to beat those long odds - that in the legend that would follow, they were going to be the nameless people that failed.