By Holly Black
Three twelve-year-olds sneak off overnight to bury a doll they're sure is haunted by the ghost of the dead girl whose bones it's made from.
Zach, Poppy, and Alice are twelve, and for years they've played one long make-believe story ruled by an antique bone-china doll they call the Great Queen, kept locked in Poppy's mom's cabinet. Then Zach's dad throws out his action figures, and instead of saying how much that stings, Zach just walks away from the game. Around the same time, Poppy tells the other two something she's been sitting on: the Queen is made from the ground-up bones of a real girl named Eleanor, who died in 1895 and now shows up in Poppy's dreams, demanding to be buried in her own grave. So the three of them slip out one night and set off by foot and bus to lay the doll to rest. The ghost does not make it easy. Poppy's dreams keep coming, the doll turns up grimy and out of place, and one wrong turn after another starts to feel less like bad luck than like Eleanor steering them toward the grave she wants.
The scares here are real, a haunted doll that leaves a lingering creep, from a writer who knows how to make a whisper in a dark room land. What pushes it higher up the dial is the feeling as much as the fright. Underneath the ghost is an honest story about three friends figuring out they're growing up at different speeds, and that's the part that sticks. A child who wants a scare with some weight to it, and who can handle a bittersweet ending, will get both. It won a Newbery Honor, and the writing asks for a confident reader.