The Dollhouse Murders By Betty Ren Wright

Once upon a time, a very sweet young version of me with a tiny streak of darkness decided to read The Dollhouse Murders. I fell in love with this book! I’ve thought about it from time to time and recently bought the 35th anniversary edition. It is definitely a classic children’s book.

Amy Treloar is frustrated with her life. She wants to hang out with friends and do young teenage things like hang at the mall. However, she is often left in charge of her sister who has a mental disability. She resents having to be a sister-sitter every day; she feels she deserves a life of her own and doesn’t want to be inextricably tied to her sister forever. After a particularly bad argument with her mom, Amy chooses to stay with her Aunt Claire in the old family home, in order to have some time and space. While learning more about her aunt and how Aunt Claire and Amy’s father grew up, Amy finds a dollhouse that is the exact replica of her great-grandparents’ house. It’s perfect…and haunted. Can Amy decipher the clues of the dollhouse to solve the murders of her great-grandparents and help heal her Aunt Claire’s grief and guilt?

Betty Ren Wright is fantastic! She handled a tough subject matter for young readers so well. Murder is a scary topic but the mystery is very interesting and the haunting of the dollhouse makes it feel creepy without going over the edge. The relationships between Amy, Aunt Claire and Louann are the focus and make the story so much better. I would have loved more time with the dollhouse and the mystery itself. It’s a kid’s book so it isn’t very long and the mystery is solved relatively quickly, which is perfect for the target audience. The resolution is a bit abrupt for an adult reader. Honestly, I still love this book. I have such good memories of it from my childhood. The Dollhouse Murders is such a wonderful little murder mystery, ghost story! Paperback Ah, 1987 was a good year. A little Johanna received this book as the summer commenced and she read, oh she read. She read the crap out of this book and then eyed the dollhouse looming in the corner of her shared bedroom with distrust and concern. She decided that she did not wish to get murdered by the inhabitants first, so she pushed it against the wall nearer to her sister's bed. Poor Becky, she thought, she is going to have to meet her maker someday, hopefully sooner than later (as Becky was seriously starting to cramp her Lisa Frank sticker collecting, and unicorn drawing at this point). It really was too bad...Becky should have learned to read faster and then she would know what the dolls were capable off, and then they could have worked together to move the dollhouse into their brother's room. In the end, the book was finished and the sister lived...but Johanna could never shake the uneasy feeling she felt every time she encountered a dollhouse. Childrens Books, Young Adult, Mystery Thrillers Like R.L. Stine and Mary Downing Hahn, the late Betty Ren Wright weaves a tale sure to terrify any tween. But more than just delicious chills imbues The Dollhouse Murders.

Amy Treloar, nearly 13 years old, can’t help resent her 11-year-old brain-damaged sister Louann. Louann’s inappropriate behavior leaves Amy with few friends but lots of anger just under the surface until she finally explodes and runs off to her Aunt Claire, newly relocated from Chicago to the isolated family homestead outside of town.

Aunt Claire intervenes and gets Amy a few days of respite from demands too great for a 12-year-old. In the old house, Amy spies the long-forgotten dollhouse Claire had as a child, an exact replica of the old family home and a gift to Claire from her grandparents, Amy’s great-grandparents. [The orphaned 14-year-old Claire and her 5-year-old brother, Paul (Amy’s father), had gone to live with their grandparents when their parents died.] Aunt Claire had little use for such a gift when she got it as a 15th birthday present and doesn’t appreciate the dollhouse any better as an adult.

Soon Amy notices that the dolls in the dollhouse â€" replicas of the Treloar family of Claire’s teens, grandparents, Claire and young Paul â€" move when they’re alone and seem to be trying to send Amy a message. When Aunt Claire refuses to intercede, Amy begins sleuthing her family’s history. With the help of Louann, Amy discovers both the secret and an appreciation for a sister she’d seen as nothing but a burden until now.

The Dollhouse Murders, a slim mystery novel aimed at tweens, proves scarier than I would have thought, with an ending I never saw coming â€" and more touching. As the mother of two daughters with autism, I’m always cheered by literature that celebrates the dignity and capabilities of all.

Special thanks to Rachel Miller for recommending this excellent book to me. Paperback I first picked up The Dollhouse Murders a little around five years ago, when I was a kid. I read it, it chilled me, I moved to another city, and slowly I forgot the title. Somedays the idea of the book came rushing back, and I was frustrated that I could not remember the title to reread it, at least, until I found the title in my brother's book order.

The Dollhouse Murders is about a girl named Amy who moves in with her aunt to try and escape some stress at home. One day she discovers a dollhouse in the attic. Little does she know that the dollhouse represents a terrible event in the past, and may also hold the answers that are needed in solving it.

Even still, five years later, when I reread The Dollhouse Muders it chilled me. As I classify it into the 'children's' genre, I found that it was simple and flowed easily, but also had the capacity to pack a punch, to say the least.

This is a book that has been--and still will be--one of my chilhood favorites.

Rating:

100/100 149 I am surprised a ghost adventure lover like me, did not know Betty Ren Wright in childhood, when her books were new. ‘Paranormal mysteries’ are still a blast in our 40s. This classic was absent from my collection. Imagine my elation, when a September 2022 sale yielded two copies! Dollhouses are always poignant figures: treasured keepsakes, antiques, or miniature haunted houses. Betty’s was unique. Her dollhouse mimed a warning!

‘Non crime mysteries’ are missing from adult literature. Kids’ stories deliver it, with a slog through baggage to get to it. I contemplated four stars, until it was clear no side story or detail was in superfluity. This novel became exceptional.

Aunt Clare has avoided their parents’ home; which Paul, Amy Trealor’s Dad, asked her to assess. The story couldn’t be without Louann, an underdeveloped sister Amy tired of carting along with her friends. Readers can even understand the prickliness of their Mom. Amy deserved teenaged freedom and their Mom felt they owed Luann catering to erratic emotions. I am most impressed now that I think of it, that for a change, the moral was not for the child. It was a wake-up call for this Mom to respect Amy’s reasonable needs! And it was a message for Mothers, to not blame their bodies for mentally deficient offspring.

Around these realistically strained dynamics, arises a spooky, unexpectedly disturbing story. Although I find family secrets hard to believe, since my Mom spilled out all the tea readily; Amy is flabbergasted to discover a family crime, involving her Dad as a toddler!

When family replicas become animated, Amy is too freaked out to stay in the room. Luann, however, does not know a fear of moving dolls. She observes something compelling. Instead of a classic, I call “The Dollhouse Murders”, 1983, a masterpiece. The Dollhouse Murders

Twelve-year-old Amy is having difficulties at home being responsible for her brain-damaged sister, Louann. While visiting her Aunt Clare at the old family home, she discovers an eerily-haunted dollhouse in the atticâ€"an exact replica of the family home. Whenever she sees it, the dolls, representing her relatives, have moved. Her aunt won't listen to Amy's claims that the dolls are trying to tell her something. This leads Amy to research old news reports where she discovers a family secretâ€"the murder of her grandparents. The two sisters unravel the mystery. Amy grows to accept her sister and to understand that Louann is more capable than she had first thought. The Dollhouse Murders

I think I would have found this spooky when I was a kid: a dollhouse whose dolls replicate the scene of the double murders of the main character's grandparents years earlier.
Amy wants to know why no one in her family talks about her grandparents, and when she finds that it's because the pair were murdered and the case never solved, she understands a little why her father and aunt are so secretive about this. When the dolls in her aunt's fantastically detailed dollhouse begin repositioning themselves to recreate the murder scene, Amy is terrified and her aunt is furious, erroneously thinking Amy is deliberately doing this.
The characters are believable, and I particularly liked Amy's intellectually disabled sister and Amy's love and frustration with her sister. I thought the author didn't play fair regarding the solution to the mystery, but, she wasn't Dame Agatha. Childrens Books, Young Adult, Mystery Thrillers When you work at a library, it's not uncommon for discussion to center around books. So imagine, one day, my colleagues and I are discussing the juvenile classics of the 80s. (By the way, this conversation was birthed while browsing the pages of Paperback Crush by Gabrielle Moss.) From this conversation came a call to read The Dollhouse Murders. I said, sure, why not. Immediately I regretted this. I had far too many books already on my to-read pile. It was Man Booker season, and I really didn't have time for a juvenile mystery about a dollhouse. But I checked out the book anyway.

Fortunately, the copy my library had was the original 1983 hardback. Why was this a good thing? Because it transported me to a very different time. How different? Let's take a look at the novel's description from the flap:

Each time Amy goes up to the attic in the middle of the night, the dollhouse is filled with a ghostly light and the dolls have moved from where she last left them. Even though Amy's terrified, she knows the dolls are trying to tell her something. But what? Could their movements be connected to the grisly murders that took place years before?
Amy becomes increasingly alarmed when her aunt Clare, who owns the dollhouse, grows angry at her questions.
In a spine-chilling climax, Amy and her retarded sister unravel the mystery and liberate their aunt from a terrible burden of guilt. [emphasis mine]

That was the 1980s for you. Amy's sister didn't even have a name. (Fortunately, Betty Ren Wright was much more sensitive to Amy's sister than whomever wrote that copy at her publisher's. Amy's sister is named Louann by the way.) I cringed as I cracked the cover.

I admit my expectations were low. I can be a little bit of a book snob, and The Dollhouse Murders clearly wasn't going to be “my thing.” What more can I say? I was sucked right in. Taking into consideration the intended juvenile audience, The Dollhouse Murders presents an interesting cast of characters, as well as a story that is chilling and riveting. Sure, it's an absurd plot about dolls reenacting a murder, but it's well-written and compelling. It's a mildly scary mystery, not all that different from your average Stephen King story. Sure, for every part King there's one part Judy Blume, but I consider that an asset. For one thing, Blume is far better at creating believable, multi-dimensional characters than King ever was. No different here. Though The Dollhouse Murders was certainly little more than juvenile escapist lit, it was a very entertaining read.

Also a plus, the original author photo:

BAM! Check that out. Make no mistake about that cat's expression: he or she is the real writer here. 9780590434614 I don't care what anyone says. Scholastic is BRILLIANT for keeping this amazingly bad cover. No revision could be as terrifying and wasn't that the whole point? This was the sort of cover I would have taped paper over when I was little just like I always did when I read THE WITCHES and any Bruce Coville where an adult was taking off their human face to reveal an alien one beneath.

Yeah, book covers were so much better in the 80's.

All and all not a bad story and certainly freaked the begeebees out of this 28-year-old at one point. I would even commend it for a rather decent portrayal of a girl coming to terms with her relationship with a mentally handicapped sibling, but DUDE the ending! THE ENDING! I like cheese and even this was too much for me. I don't care how good a murder mystery is. Without a good ending what's the point? Childrens Books, Young Adult, Mystery Thrillers I wish I could have read this one when I was younger, because it would have been RIGHT up my alley. I LOVED books like this when I was in school.

Reading it for the first time as an adult, leaves a bit to be desired, but I can still appreciate it being intended for the target audience.

I did get a bit annoyed by some of the characters and that contributed to the loss of the star. Again, this was age specific, and I hesitate to rate it based on my enjoyment, when I get why the author's wrote the characters that way.

Excellent paranormal series for teens, there is a bit of horror stuff that may not be appropriate for younger kids in the middle-grade age group. There is also a lot of selfish behavior and meanness towards a disabled sister that was harder to read as an adult.

Solid 3 Star for me 0590434616 Another great middle school read. Perfect for summer! 0590434616