THE WINTER OF THE DOLLHOUSE, by Laura Amy Schlitz
I was just sitting down to write this review when, scrolling on Instagram (OK, procrastinating), I was fed a video on @curbed that made my insides go ding-ding-ding. It was a clip of Amy Sedaris showing off her beloved dollhouse. The actor, author and professional eccentric, who by the way is 64 (I checked), has a custom dollhouse built into the fireplace of her West Village apartment. As she explains in the video, she hired someone to add the wallpaper and basically serve as her dollhouse’s interior designer, even creating a haunted attic complete with a shattered window. Watching it, I thought: This is the best use of leisure money I’ve ever seen.
Don’t ask me to prove it, but a love of dollhouses never dies. A youthful devotion to ballet, horses, comic books, choo-choo trains, “Star Wars,” even (forgive me) God often dims with the advent of puberty. But if you were ever a kid enchanted by miniatures, you will most certainly go to your grave coveting four-inch chairs and itty-bitty teacups, drawn to their impossible precision and the promise of complete, controllable worlds.
The Newbery medalist Laura Amy Schlitz is a masterly storyteller best known for her historical fiction. (I laughed and sobbed an embarrassing amount over “The Hired Girl,” her young adult novel about a spirited, book-loving servant in 1911 Baltimore.) Her new middle grade novel, “The Winter of the Dollhouse,” though set in the present, has the fully drawn characters, emotional pull and timeless feel of her other works, which make it old-fashioned in the best way.
It follows Tiph, an 11-year-old who is transfixed by a tiny doll in the window of a local dollhouse shop. Having lost her mother when she was 2, and now navigating life with a distracted father, younger half siblings and a helicoptery millennial stepmother, Tiph feels cast out of her own family. The doll, Gretel, becomes her obsession. “She’s got a really good face,” Tiph says. “I mean, she looks like a person, not a doll.”
Gretel, naturally, is no ordinary toy. She is “an original Von Schwangau,” a rare antique, modeled on the Brothers Grimm fairy-tale heroine. And in the classic tradition of doll and toy stories — from Rumer Godden’s “The Doll’s House” to Pixar’s “Toy Story” — the playthings in “The Winter of the Dollhouse” spring to life when humans aren’t watching. Gretel also has a toy’s essential longing: to be loved and played with.
In alternating chapters, Tiph befriends an “old lady” in her neighborhood with a “witchy” smile and begins earning money to buy the doll, while Gretel has her own adventures: befriending another Von Schwangau doll, braving a menacing dog and cat, and struggling to be united with Tiph.
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