Dollhouse- A Book Review

Book Name: Dollhouse

Genre: Mystery/Horror

Author: Anya Allyn

Review By: Kaia Willis

The first book in a trilogy, Dollhouse, by Anya Allyn is a not so scary, not so mysterious horror/mystery book.

I put off reading it for a while, because I don’t like scary books. It’s a good thing it wasn’t scary. If written better, it could have been terribly frightening. And don’t get me wrong, the author did an amazing job of writing, I just didn’t find any mystery or horror in it. She had a good plotline, and story theme, but there was nothing that made me feel any emotion.

Cassie Claiborne is a 15-year-old Miami girl, who is forced to move to a rural Australian town, with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. She finds a group of friends right away. Aisha, Ethan and Lacey. One day, on a fieldtrip, Aisha runs off, and disappears without a trace. Cassie believes it’s her fault, because of the crush she has on Ethan who, along with being her friend, is Aisha’s boyfriend.

Four weeks later, Ethan leaves and camps out in the forest where Aisha disappeared, because the police are after him. They believe he killed Aisha. Cassie and Lacey get together, and decide they’ll join him, while searching for Aisha. Hopefully, it will bring them to a conclusion about what actually happened. They go for a week without finding any information. Then they accidentally wander into the cellar of the mansion, and discover a life size dollhouse.

Okay, not a literal dollhouse. But there are walking dolls, and five girls dressed up as dolls. Lacey disappears on the way in. In the dollhouse, they meet Jessamine, a controlling girl, who tells the other girls what to do, or they get severely punished.

Will Cassie and Ethan escape? Do they find Aisha? And who is the mysterious Jessamine.

I was left with quite a few questions unanswered when I finished this book, but I’m not sure if I’ll be reading the other two. It just wasn’t quite good enough.