Still reading kids' books.
23 January 2014
Thanks to the Reader's Advisor Online blog (which I co-edit), I noticed last week that the author Betty Ren Wright had died.
That name stood out because Wright was a Wisconsin author (Kenosha) and also because she wrote a book I really enjoyed when I was a kid: The Dollhouse Murders.
So just for old time's sake I checked the book out from the library last week and re-read it one night. It's the story of a twelve-year-old girl named Amy, who, after showing some frustration that she is always expected to babysit her younger and disabled sister Louann, is allowed to go stay with her Aunt Claire at the family's ancestral home (where, unbeknownst to her, her father's and Claire's grandparents, who raised them, met their untimely ends) for the summer. When she finds a beautiful dollhouse (and one that is modeled on the house in which she is staying, complete with dolls made to represent the family) in the attic, she's excited to play with it...until she starts to notice that the dolls in the house sometimes move themselves. And, more disturbingly, they move themselves into the positions in which they were found, murdered.
I put that in italics because it creeped the hell out of me as a kid, and it still creeps the hell out of me.* Can Amy solve the mystery of the dollhouse, and the mystery of her great-grandparents' deaths as well? You bet she can. Let's hear it for Wisconsin girls; they can do anything.
*Dolls have always creeped me out and always will, full stop. I love my mother-in-law, but she collects dolls, and although I like visiting her, I do not like the way all her dolls watch me with their beady little eyes.
**Also: the image at the top of this post is a newer reissue of the book; the image at the bottom is the cover on the book when I first read it. And is, I think, the scarier cover. Do you agree?