Doll Bones

Hey!  Happy first day of Lent!  Rather, somber and reflective first day of lent.  Get your Ash to Mass!  It is NOT a holy day of obligation, but it's still a good idea to go!

Also, it's the 14th anniversary of the passing of this great man, my Grampa Lowery.

I'm a little excited because if we have a boy, we're naming him John Paul Benedict.  First after the great popes, and second, after both of my grandfathers.  Pretty neat.  Although, I would like to have a little girl for Grampa Finke, because I'm pretty sure he'd feel about her the way Grampa Lowery felt about me.  

Anyways, enough of the mush!  On to the meat and potatoes.  Speaking of meat and potatoes, this pregnancy is making me have a severe aversion to beef, specifically steak.

I FEEL LIKE A COMMUNIST.  

Doll Bones
Holly Black
244 Pages, reading time:

Back cover reads: Poppy, Zach, and Alice always played on continuous game- a game that takes place in a world populated with pirates and thieves, mermaids and warriors.  Ruling over them all is the Great Queen, a bone-china doll imprisoned in a cabinet, cursing those who displease her.  But the tree friends are in middle school now, and Zach's father, forces him to give up make-believe.  Their friendship seems over, until Poppy has dreams about the Queen- and the ghost of a girl who will not rest until the doll is buried in her empty grave.   So Zach and Alice and Poppy set off on one last adventure, to lay the Queen's ghost to rest.  But as creepy things begin to happen, they have to wonder: IF there really is a ghost, will it let them go now that it has them in its clutches?








Initial Reaction:  Hmmmm.  An interesting little mystery (which ends up being genuinely creepy) that has typical jr. high drama peppered in.  I appreciate the vocabulary and the alacrity with which the story flowed, but I'm not turning backflips over it.  Also, the three kids seem to be a little obsessed with ghosts, which doesn't sit well with me.  It's a little dark, but not too dark.  More creepy than dark.  I did enjoy the plethora of allusions to nerd-life, especially LOTR and Narnia.

Promote Virtue?  We're told the story from Zach's point of view, and each of the characters has their own inner turmoil that they face.  I think that the book focuses more on the problems of the kids and their insistence to solve the mystery rather than promoting virtue and character.

Transcendentals?  Slim to none.

Overcome human condition?  No. Poppy, Zach, and Alice are transitioning into the junior high years, and Zach is forced to stop playing the game when his father takes the characters away.  In order to complete their story, the kids run away from home, hop a bus to a town 50 miles away, commandeer a small sailboat, and break into a public library.  I mean, there is perseverance, but they are just playing  game after all.  They are trying to solve a mystery, but Aquinas wouldn't be impressed with all the bad things they're doing just to achieve a "good" (and trite) outcome.

Attitude toward Catholicism?  NA

Paganry?  Belief in ghosts

Swearing?  No

Violence?  Weird/creepy descriptions of how a girl fell from a roof and died, and her father used her cremated ashes to make bone china.

Appropriate age?  5th grade +

Writing Style:  Black writes in a simple and straightforward way that is compelling, but not intriguing.  The work contains excellent structure, tone, description, and vocabulary words.  The book was a quick read, and all loose strings were pretty much tied up at the end.

Notable Quoteables:

"The walls were covered in posters- Doctor Who, a cat in a bowler hat, and a giant map of Narnia" (13).

"He managed to talk the coach into letting him shoot hoops in the gym, which he did methodically, alone, letting himself drown in the thump of the ball, the squeak of his sneakers, and the familiar smell of fresh floor wax and old sweat" (53-54).

"He'd had a firm belief in universally observed monster rules.  He'd been sure, for example, that if he kept all parts of himself on the mattress and shrouded beneath blankets, if he kept his eyes closed, and if he pretended to be asleep, then he'd be safe.  He didn't know where he'd gotten the idea from" (56).  YES.  As long as i am on top of the mattress (no limbs hanging off) and tucked under the covers, I am SAFE.  Letting your 9 year old kid watch Alien is NEVER a good idea.

"When he finally went to the cabinets, he felt as though he was provisioning himself for one of those epic fantasy quests-the kind that required a lot of jerky or something called hardtack that he'd read about soldiers eating during the Civil War and which he thought might be a kind of bread.  His mother didn't have either of those things, nor did she have elven lembas, which had kept Frodo and Sam from starving on the way to Mount Doom..."(71-72).  Heh.

"He wondered whether growing up was learning that most stories turned out to be lies" (75).  This is why we're going to celebrate the feast of St. Nicholas on December 6th and not Santa Claus on Christmas.

"Turning, he saw the Queen resting in the dirt right behind his head, far from where she'd been the night before.  Her black eyes were wide open, leering down at him.  Now that it was daytime, he could see that the glass orbs were slightly too small for her eye sockets, leaving gaps in the corners.  An ant crawled out from one of them, marching across her eye and up over her forehead into the thicket of her hair" (113).  HORRIFYING!

"Aragorn never wore sunblock" (134).  hah.

Great words: hangdog innocence, placating, insomniac, mewling, parlay, regurgitating, incredulity.

Final Summation:

It's an ok story that has its charm, but it doesn't excite me.