Gothic and wonderfully creepy, Golds’s (Clair-de-Lune
) atmospheric story delights, offering meditations on the nature and power of love. Lonely Heloise wants only to be loved, but lives as if jailed in the house of her stern and sometimes cruel godmother. One day Heloise uncovers a beautiful doll, Maria, hidden under the floorboards of her room, and it is love at first sight. Heloise hides Maria from her godmother, whose personal Ten Commandments include forbidding play, “pretty clothes” and the possession of a doll, not to mention never uttering the word love (“We are all of us evil. And to love something evil is wicked,” she professes). Once Maria is discovered, Heloise finds out the horrible truth about the museum that adjoins her godmother’s cottage and is thrust down a strange and magical path that reveals how sheltered she has been (“Most people, she now knew, had heard music. Most people had seen pictures”). Readers will wonder throughout: who is Heloise really—or better, what is she? Aside from an occasional tendency toward sentimental prose, Golds’s novel is pure fun, filled with mystery and nearly impossible to put down. Ages 11–up. (Sept.)
