Doll bones

A trio of adolescents goes on a quest to satisfy the demands of a ghost. Sounds like standard middle-grade fare, but in Blacks absolutely assured hands, it is anything but. Zach, Poppy, and Alice have been playing the same make-believe game for years, one involving pirates and mermaids and, of course, the Great Queen-a creepy, bone-china doll at Poppys house. Then Poppy reveals that shes been haunted by a girl whose ground-up bones lie inside the Great Queen, so the doll must be properly buried. Begrudgingly, the three agree to play one last game and hope against hope for "a real adventure, the kind that changed you." With heart-wrenching swiftness, Black paints a picture of friends at the precipice of adulthood; they can sense the tentative peace of youth that is about to be demolished. The tightly focused, realistic tale-bladed with a hint of fairy-tale darkness-feels cut from the very soul of youth: there is no sentimentality, no cuteness, only the painful, contradictory longing to move forward in ones life without leaving anything behind.