2015 read #40: Doll Bones by Holly Black.

Doll Bones by Holly Black
247 pages
Published 2013
Read from August 7 to August 9
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

My brother and I didn't so much tell each other stories as come up with characters and bounce them off each other in improv comedy skits. I would go on to use the characters -- toned down versions, largely stripped of their adolescent-boy vulgarity and sexual depravity, but still recognizable -- in my earliest writings. Our characters began life as GI Joes: my main character Doug was the Freefall doll, while Randy's protagonist George was derived from Mainframe. The characters emerged in the process of playing a sort of graph-paper baseball with our dolls, then evolved over time, incorporating elements of slapstick cartoons and ultra-violence and Classical mythology until the former baseball superstars were immortal gods wielding whimsical, lecherous tyranny over their demesne. Writing stories down was my thing, begun when I was 9 or 10 years old, when Randy and I decided to transcribe one of our skits as it played out; he gave up after a page, while I (for example) cast my "sequel" to Jurassic Park with appropriate substitutions from our pantheon, years before I learned that fan-fiction was a thing. But whenever I doubted the central relationship in this book, in which the three 12 year old protagonists act out a protracted storytelling "game" with dolls and cardboard boxes standing in for pirates and queens and temples, I only had to remind myself how I got into the writing business -- and to recall that my brother, four years older than I, was still play-acting with our GI Joe dolls when I began writing out my stories.

I wanted to like this book. I thought I had read a promising short story or two by Holly Black, but I must have gotten her mixed up with the likes of Margo Lanagan or Kelly Link; I can't find a single reference to Black in my archived reviews, and I certainly wouldn't have encountered her before I began this reading project. But even without that to recommend her, the conceit of Doll Bones sounded nicely creepy, and the travails of adolescence and finding your friendships changed is always a productive mine for YA fantasy. Unfortunately, Doll Bones failed to distinguish itself on either front, neither especially creepy nor memorable and affecting. It goes through the motions, what with the big accusatory scene in which friendships are questioned right as the quest reaches its breaking point, doing its thing efficiently but without much impact. Plus there's the implausibility of three kids stealing a sailboat in broad daylight and noodling it down the Ohio River. I dunno, for a book revolving around a possibly-haunted doll possibly made from a little girl's bones, that just struck me as too far-fetched.