Doll Bones

Doll Bones portrays children on the cusp of outgrowing childhood. Black examines the story behind when and how children stop playing and the role of outside forces such as parents and mocking peers. Zach, for instance, stops playing because of his father’s judgment and because he is embarrassed around his classmates. Alice is also constrained by an outside force, her overprotective grandmother.

Doll Bones examines The Transition From Childhood to Adolescence. As a middle grade coming-of-age story, the child characters shift from a state of innocence and naivety to one of greater insight and maturity. The characters grapple with the complexities of their developing sexuality and how this complicates their friendships. For example, Poppy asks about Lady Jaye and William the Blade’s feelings for one another. She seems to be asking about the characters that Alice and Zach play, but she is really asking about Alice and Zach. The children transition to adolescence at different speeds. While Alice has identified her crush on Zach, Zach believes “the girls had just gotten weird” and that “everyone at school looked at him differently all of a sudden” (20). Zach lags behind both Poppy and Alice, unaware of the romantic developments among his peers. He wants things to remain the same and is confused as to why that can’t be the case.

These chapters introduce another key theme, The Importance of Stories and Escapism. Poppy uses games and stories to escape her neglectful home life. Her house is a mess of “discarded clothes, half-empty cups, and sports equipment,” and her parents had “given up on the house around the same time they gave up on trying to enforce any rules about dinners and bedtimes and fighting” (9). Poppy’s lack of structure explains why she seeks to exert control within the games she plays with Zach and Alice. She makes up most of the rules and struggles when the others try to give input. While Zach and Alice are envious of Poppy’s freedom at home, they only see things from an outsider’s perspective. What to them seems like the perfect situation is at the root of Poppy’s greatest insecurities and fear, that of abandonment by her friends.

Zach also finds escape through stories. Zach implies that his father has a history of letting him down: He “and his mom had been fine before his father moved back in, and they’d be fine when he left again, too” (18). Stories are a way for Zach to channel lost magic and hope for a brighter future, one where he doesn’t turn out like his father. When his father takes away his action figures, Zach loses part of himself. Instead of being energized for school and daydreaming about stories in class, Zach thinks about running away and abandoning the town and his family as his father had done in the past.

Black creates a gothic, ominous atmosphere through language. For example, while playing the role of William the Pirate, Zach imagines the shark fins around the Neptune’s Pearl “lashing back and forth as they waited for the boat to get closer, their silly plastic smiles hiding their lethal intentions” (6). Black also evokes foreboding when Zach walks home from school and passes Mr. Thompson’s old house. Zach “[feels] the tickle of the hairs on the back of his neck, as though whatever [is] coming [is] right behind him, as though he [can] feel its breath” (20). These moments introduce the possibility that something sinister lurks beneath a harmless exterior and foreshadows how Eleanor Kerchner’s spirit is trapped within the Great Queen doll.