GENRE: Children's Paranormal Fiction
SETTING: Connecticut, USA
MY GRADE: B
SYNOPSIS: The house at Cinder Creek hides many secrets. Shelby and Brian Tate have heard heated voices crying out in the night. They've noticed the unsettling way things move around on their own. But the most chilling thing about their new home is the cemetery someone's built out back. The graves are tiny, only big enough for dolls.
Soon Shelby's learning all about them. Betsy Anne's angelic appearance hides a raging fire behind her eyes, while Baby Daisy changes faces as quickly as she changes moods. And Miss Amelia's cracked porcelain skin and twisted lips only hint at the pain she once endured at the hands of a very angry girl. If Shelby can help the dolls find peace, she and her family might actually be happy at Cinder Creek. But if she can't--the dolls will have their revenge...
MY THOUGHTS: This story is told through almost twelve-year-old precocious Shelby. She lives with her nine-year-old brother, Brian. They move into an old manor with their divorced mother, Serena. It was left to them at the beginning of the story by Serena's aunt Amelia, who's dying. She leaves Shelby to figure out a mystery that she knows nothing about by giving her a doll named Isabella's hat.
Dolls are buried in graves outside and they're in a horseshoe shaped pattern. They end up back inside the house in their dollhouse multiple times even after being reburied. Shelby has to figure out where a doll named Lady is and why she wasn't in the graveyard with the other dolls, and to figure out what really happened to Sadie, a little girl who owned the dolls and lived in that house decades before. Was it murder or natural causes?
The target audience for this book is grades 4-6 but I think that's too young an age group for the subject matter, as it involves the supernatural and talk of the possible murder of a child who lived there years before. The main character sounds more like a teenager or adult, so it didn't seem like a sixth grader was talking, and she's very witty. There's also writings in a journal from an eleven-year-old girl named Emily and she too sounded too mature. Her grammar is perfect, as is her punctuation and spelling. That's not likely accurate for someone so young to be 100% perfect in their writing.
There were quite a lot of characters in this 246-page book, at least fifteen, unless I miscounted, and if an adult can have trouble keeping up with who's who, and they will, an elementary school child certainly will. The dark subject matter combined with Shelby's upbeat personality didn't really mesh well for me. This would have worked better if it had been a young adult book. And I don't think the plot fully made since. I'm a little confused by it but I did enjoy it more than not.
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