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Doll Bones

by Holly Black

A childhood game becomes a ghostly quest

Regular price $10.91 USD
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Awards & Recognition

  • Award recognition

    Newbery Honor Book

    The book is described as a Newbery Honor Book, not as the Newbery Medal winner.

AlbakiReads Editorial

A childhood game becomes a ghostly quest

Zach, Poppy, and Alice have built an ongoing imaginary world around pirates, mermaids, warriors, and a bone-china doll known as the Great Queen. When Zach steps away from the game under pressure to grow up, Poppy’s account of dreams involving the doll and a restless ghost draws the friends into one final adventure. The journey brings their changing friendship together with questions of make-believe, adulthood, and whether the Queen is only a doll. The book combines middle-grade horror elements with an adventure centered on three friends confronting a shift in how they play—and how they relate to one another.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Middle-grade readers interested in friendship stories about childhood and growing up.
  • Readers who enjoy ghostly adventures and eerie dolls.
  • Readers drawn to imaginative games and quests involving a close-knit group of friends.

Themes

Friendship and changeGrowing upImagination and make-believeGhosts and the supernatural

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

A Newbery Honor Book
Six starred reviews!
"A chilling ghost story, a gripping adventure, and a heartwarming look at the often-painful pull of adulthood." --School Library Journal (starred review)

Three friends embark on one last quest to help the ghost haunting a doll in this "deep, strange, and compelling" (The New York Times Book Review) illustrated middle grade horror by New York Times bestselling author Holly Black, cocreator of The Spiderwick Chronicles.

Zach, Poppy, and Alice have been friends forever. And for almost as long, they've been playing one continuous, ever-changing game of pirates and thieves, mermaids and warriors. Ruling over all is the Great Queen, a bone-china doll cursing those who displease her.

But they are in middle school now. Zach's father pushes him to give up make-believe, and Zach quits the game. Their friendship might be over, until Poppy declares she's been having dreams about the Queen--and the ghost of a girl who will not rest until the bone-china doll is buried in her empty grave.

Zach, Alice, and Poppy set off on one last adventure to lay the Queen's ghost to rest. But nothing goes according to plan, and as their adventure turns into an epic journey, creepy things begin to happen. Is the doll just a doll or something more sinister? And if there really is a ghost, will it let them go now that it has them in its clutches?
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