Abby is a little girl who has just finished first grade. Her brother comes home from school for summer vacation and brings a birthday present — a dollhouse with boxes of furniture and dolls, even a miniature laptop computer. Thus begins Abby and the Secrets of the Dollhouse, part of The Good News Series.
Interestingly, Abby is not clued into the dollhouse’s secrets although the reader is. Abby is concerned with having a good summer vacation and tells the reader all about the people in her neighborhood. One elderly neighbor moves away, and a family moves into her house. They have a little girl named Maggie who becomes Abby’s best friend. Among Abby’s other neighbors are crabby Mr. McGruder who doesn’t allow roller-skating on the sidewalk in front of his house, and his wife, who does. Mrs. McGruder is always pleasant; Mr. McGruder seems to be the only crank in the neighborhood.
The story is told partly with Abby as the narrator and partly through Abby’s journal entries. For some reason, the first paragraph in Chapter Nine is told in the third person, followed by a journal entry, and ending as a first person narrative. Chapter 10 also begins in the third person, slips into first person, then back to third. This bit of schizoid style makes it seem like the book was written from one perspective, then edited to another, but not completely.
Abby chronicles her last day of school, birthday, baseball games, and visits to Mrs. Livingston, the neighbor who moved. Her brother sets her dollhouse up on a table in her bedroom and she and Maggie decorate it. The next morning, all the furnishings had been moved. Abby suspects her younger brother was playing a trick on her, but he wasn’t.
When Abby is sleeping, the dolls in the dollhouse wake up. They were not happy with the way Abby redecorated their home and moved everything where it “should” have been. The little dolls are a family, and their laptop computer enables them to time travel. The young sister and brother do just that, going back in time to 28 A.D. (Some Biblical scholars would argue with that choice of year), and visit the Sea of Galilee the day after Jesus calmed the stormy waters. They meet witnesses to the event who describe the details. Soon their laptop battery is low and they have to return to their time and the dollhouse.
Article comments
1 - Debbie Steever
Your review was very interesting. I am an author of two books I wish you would check them out and review them. Family Secrets or Lies and Dead at 30 both by Debbie Steever