Betty Ren Wright

Scholastic, Inc.

Amy and her sister solve the mystery of why the dolls in the attic dollhouse mysteriously move from where they were left and why their Aunt Clare gets angry with questions about the dollhouse.

The Dollhouse Murders

It was just an old dollhouse. Hidden away in the attic--collecting dust. Amy didn't know that the dollhouse held a secret. A deadly secret that hadn't been talked about in years. And now, the dolls have decided that Amy should be the one to know the truth. The truth about the night of the murder...
--back cover

Sarah Sammis

I remember reading The Dollhouse Murders by Betty Ren Wright in elementary school. It must have been right around the time when it was first published. I remember liking the idea of a haunted dollhouse but being annoyed by the book. When I saw the book at my library I decided to give it a second try. I liked it a lot more as an adult than I did as a child.

Amy needs some free time from her sister, Louann. Her sister is special needs, having suffered brain damage although I don't think how that happened is explained. Regardless, Louann needs extra help and Amy is stuck being the one always providing that extra care because their mother needs to work and money is tight. There isn't a father so their mother has the extra stress of being a single mother.

In the middle of all that family drama is a chance to get away for a birthday party at Aunt Clara's home. It's at the old family home where the ghost story takes center stage. In the attic is a model of the home with dolls representing the family as it was some fifteen or twenty years earlier. The dolls in the house replay the scene of a grisly murder that has been buried in family secrets all these years.

The ghost story by itself is chilling and terrifying. It though gets lost in the parallels the author is trying to draw between Clara and her brother and Amy and Louann. Add in Louann's problems, the added difficulties of being a single parent and basic sibling rivalries and the ghost story gets lost in the shuffle.

I said at the beginning that I liked it more as an adult. I did and I think it stems from me being now able to relate to the adults in the book. They are realistically portrayed even if the book as a whole is more complicated than it needs to be.

Lynn Braden

Because Amy is so tired of caring for her mentally challenged sister, Louann, she goes to stay for a few days with her Aunt Clare who is in town for the summer to close up and sell the house where her grandparents were murdered. Amy finds a dollhouse in the attic that looks just like the house where she is staying, right down to the furniture. Amy places some dolls in the house and enjoys playing with them until one morning, she wakes up and finds that they are in different places than the night before. Clare becomes very angry when Amy tells her about the moving dolls because she thinks Amy is lying to her and moving the dolls herself into the positions where her grandparents were found after the murder.
It is difficult to determine what is going on with the dollhouse in The Dollhouse Murders. Are the dolls really moving themselves or is someone going to the attic each night an moving them? There is also the unsolved murder of Clare's grandparents from years before, making this an interesting and unique mystery.

The Dollhouse Murders

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