Holly Black's best known work, The Spiderwick Chronicles, is an authorial collaboration (with Tony DiTerlizzi), as is her very recent fantasy, The Iron Trial (this time with Cassandra Clare). These books almost inevitably suffer from some lack of individual distinctiveness of voice. This is not, of course, to say that they do not do what they do exceptionally well. The enormous popularity of the Spiderwick books speaks for itself. They very effectively bring the engrossing thrill of good fantasy into the scope of very young readers. These short, accessible books provide what is probably one of the very best introductions to this genre for children who are ready to make their first moves into independent novel reading. In this sense they do for modern children what the books of Edith Nesbit did for children in the early 20th century, those of Enid Blyton for those of the postwar generations, and Roald Dahl in the later years of the century; they provide accessible reading that is at once both exciting and comforting, highly imaginative adventuring from the safety of the sofa, vicarious escape from the constraint of adults that involves no need to leave home.
For more confident and experienced young readers The Iron Trial builds from established conventions to provides what is one of the very best if-you-enjoyed-Harry-Potter-you-will-love-this reads that I have come across in a long time.
However it is in the quite remarkable, independently authored Doll Bones that I feel the writing of Holly Black really comes into its own. This is a work of truly original voice, stunning imagination, deep sensitivity and enriching humanity.
I would not really call Doll Bones a fantasy novel, yet I have no hesitation in including it here because it is in every aspect a book about fantasy. Despite any impression to the contrary that the titular doll and its accompanying dominant cover illustration might give, this is to me very much a boys' book, or at least a book about a boy. Although two of its three principal characters are girls, feisty Poppy and the somewhat dreamier Alice, we only really know and discover them in so far as the book's real protagonist, Zach, comes to know and discover them. Although not a first person narrative, we see them, and indeed the whole world of the book through his eyes.
The girls are the collaborators in Zach's world of 'play' and they share an elaborate and ongoing game of imaginative world-building and role enactment, supported by their various collections of old toys, dolls and action figures, who represent its cast of heroes and villains. The lives of these three children are rich in story and enriched by make-believe. They clearly read widely and then use their own imaginations to extend and elaborate the worlds they have found in their books, to make them 'real' for themselves and to keep themselves within them. Their sharing in this 'play' bonds them closely together in a very special friendship.
Yet Zach is twelve. He is on the verge of growing past such things, or at least in the eyes of many around him. However he is not yet ready to move on. Although he sometimes feels he should, he does not really want to.
The catalyst of both the action and the development in the story is Zach's father who particularly desperately wants his son to 'get real' and 'man up'. He almost succeeds in destroying the boy's imaginary world when one day he removes and destroys the action figures which are Zach's story props.
Devastated, Zach feels he can no longer 'play' with the girls. His characters have been killed off and therefore the whole game terminated. But Poppy soon succeeds in reeling him back in by taking one of their existing characters, an antique doll from a cabinet in her home, and building around it a new and 'spooky' story about a girl wo was killed and whose bones were subsequently ground down to create the china from which the doll is made. This doll now wishes to be taken home and buried there so that she can find 'closure' and rest.
Both of the girls in the story introduce a confusion between imagination and reality, although in very different ways. Poppy wants so much to keep him sharing her story life that she gets him to play out in actuality a fantasy adventure, the quest to quiet the 'ghost' of the titular doll. Alice, on the other hand, although ambivolently still attached to the imaginative world of their 'play', wants to pull Zach back with her to the real world because of embryonic romantic feelings for him.
Whether or not this is a real ghost story remains ambiguous; it is the tale of the doll and the way in which Zach is drawn in to acting it out which is far more important.
In this book Holly Black has stepped aside from writing in the fantasy tradition itself, although it is that very tradition which so influences her characters. It is clear that Zach, Poppy and Alice are avid readers and the books of Tolkein, Rowling, Riorden, Paver and their like are what feed their imaginations. In contrast, her own book, for me, sits in that wonderful tradition of American children's fiction where the very real issues of its its young protagonists are played out through exploration of their imaganitive lives. I suppose the classic of the genre is Katherine Patterson's The Bridge to Terabithia, although there are other wonderful,examples from the likes of Betsy Byers, Lowis Lowry, and more recently Anne Ursu's Breadcrumbs.
Yet Holly Black's creation is not in the least derivative. It takes an imaginative, sensitive boy's issues in beginning to face adolescence and the emerging demands of 'being a man' and explores them through his interactions with two girl friends, each going through their own growing. It is both an exciting adventure and an intriguingly spooky story. Superficially it is a reckless road trip, inwardly it is a magical, mystical quest.
The book's greatest triumph of all is that its resolution is quite wonderfully affirmative. At its end Zach, together with Poppy and Alice, faces a real future which is uncertain and very probably difficult. But he has learned that it is possible to live out and, indeed, fulfil a quest; stories can and will continue, imagination will still play a huge part in his life. The corollary is that stories can play a part in all our lives too. We need never grow out of them. And this is a wonderful message.
It is a book for which fully deserves the accolades and awards it has achieved. It is a small masterpiece and a must for imaginative boys everywhere. It should become another classic of the canon.
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