I highly recommend this book to 4th grade and up, including adults. What happens when close friends go over the fence at different times? Will the haunted doll bind them together forever? Or will their friendship be buried in the past along with the doll bones? Holly Black does a great job of capturing the middle school fence and how tweens are perched between innocent, playful childhood behind them and the rocky, intense, peer-pressured teen years ahead of them. They go on their adventure and their friendship is tested to the breaking point. Is it just another one of Poppy’s stories or is the doll really haunted? Strange things start happening. If they don’t, the Great Queen will haunt them all forever. Then Poppy comes to them with a story that the Great Queen is haunting her dreams and wants them to take the doll to her final burying place in another town. This is made worse by Zach’s father who thinks it is time for Zach to grow up. Zach gets busy with basketball and is starting to feel embarrassed playing pretend with girls. In the end, Doll Bones turned out to be not as creepy as expected but more thoughtful than I was hoping. Things start to change when the kids get to middle school. The center of the crusade is the Great Queen, which is actually an antique china doll locked in Poppy’s mother’s china cabinet. Plastic action figures and paper boats become pirates battling evil mermaids on the seven seas. Three friends, Poppy, Alice and Zach, have been playing a game of pretend since they were in elementary school.
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