Doll Bones
Dust jacket of the hard-cover edition showing the Newbery Medallion.
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| Author | Holly Black |
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| Illustrator | Eliza Wheeler |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Young Adult Fiction, Fantasy, Gothic Fiction |
| Publisher | McElderry Books, Scholastic Corporation |
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Publication date
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2013 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 244 pp |
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Doll Bones is a 2013 Young Adult novel by author Holly Black with illustrations by Eliza Wheeler. Doll Bones won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award in Children's Literature and was a Newbery Medal Honor Book in 2014.
Doll Bones is the story of Zachary "Zach" Barlow, Alice Magnaye, and Poppy Bell's quest to return a haunted doll to its proper grave site in another town. Zach, Alice, and Poppy play a role-playing game with informal rules using action figures and paper cut-outs. Poppy runs the game which involves Zach's character "William the Blade" and Alice's character "Lady Jayne" on a quest for the Great Queen aboard William's sailing ship, Neptune's Pearl. One day Zach discovers that his father has thrown out all of his action figures including William, effectively ending the game. Furious at his father, and embarrassed that he cares so much about a "kid's game", Zach decides not to tell Alice and Poppy what happened and instead says he just does not want to play anymore.
Zach is woken in the middle of the night by Alice and Poppy who tell him that Poppy has had a dream about the "Great Queen" (an antique doll her mother keeps locked in a glass cabinet that the kids use for the game) and that the doll is made from the bones and ashes of a dead girl named Eleanor Kerchner who is now a ghost and wants to be returned to her proper grave. The three kids leave notes for their parents and take a night bus to East Liverpool, Ohio (a few hour's bus ride away) hoping to return the following evening to avoid discovery. On the bus they are accosted by a man named Tinshoe Jones who seems to see the doll as a real person and warns them that the bus driver talks with aliens who "change people faces". The bus makes a stop in East Rochester, PA and the children flee when it appears the bus driver and station attendant intend to capture them.
They spend the night in a small park near the Ohio river and during the night their meager supplies are inexplicably torn apart and ruined. They enter a donut shop with exotic flavored donuts and the shopkeeper offers the "hungry blond girl" (the doll) a Pepto Bismol flavored donut. They argue about the quest, but, still hoping to catch the bus back home in time, decide to continue the quest if possible by walking to East Liverpool. The quest seems to end, however, when they find themselves on the banks of a tributary river flowing into the Ohio. Alice is ready to return home, but Poppy, realizing both Alice and Zach have secrets, blackmails them into continuing the quest. They steal a small sailboat named "Pearl" and clumsily sail their way to East Liverpool. Angry, wet, disheartened, and now late for the bus, the three argue again and Poppy reveals that Alice loves Zach and wants to date him.
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