Corinne and Ashley are sisters who lost their father almost a year ago. Both went on with their daily lives, but are still emotionally affected by the loss as they were always close to him. Corinne is also trying to have a baby and down to their last round of IVF (paid for by Ashley). She starts finding pieces of her childhood dollhouse at first thinking it's a good omen for the future, but they seem threatening after while, appearing and disappearing so others don't take her seriously. Ashley feels her husband pulling further and further away from her while she cares for their three children on her own. As she grows frustrated at being on her own most of the time, her infant never sleeps through the night and her oldest seems to be getting more and more in trouble. Do their problems have perfectly reasonable explanations or is something more sinister afoot?
The Doll House is a psychological thriller with some twists and turns. It's told mainly from three different voices: Corrine, Ashley, and a third unnamed girl in the past. Corrine is kind of fragile. From the very beginning, she's easily startled, still reeling from the death of her father, and devastated that she might never become a mother. I found her story the most frustrating because pretty much everyone in her life dismissed her very real concerns of her home being invaded. I found Ashley the most sympathetic because she is trying to a run a household and take care of three kids at very different stages while her husband spends more and more time at work (if that's what he's actually doing). She expected to have help and having everything thrown in her lap is only making her feel resentful and incredibly stressed as her children's problems worsen over time.
The third woman remains unnamed for most of the novel. Hints are dropped here and there to make her relationship to the other girls more clear. Her mother mistreated her growing up, forcing her out at all hours to spy on another family. Over time, her mother's obsession became her obsession. I felt sorry for her, but only up to a point. The identity of this woman and her mother came as a huge surprise to me. By the end of the book, I was puzzled as to why they would choose to plan as they did. It seems like they would be easily caught by the end, successful or not, so why bother to be so secretive and perfectly planned only to give a stereotypical villain monologue revealing everything.
The Doll House is an overall enjoyable book. My main problems with it are in the villains and the horror aspects. Based on the cover, I thought it would be more horror I also thought there was an inkling of supernatural that would grow into something more, but everything stayed squarely in reality. Other than that, it's a decent thriller that's well plotted and interwoven between the three main characters.
My rating: 3.5/5 fishmuffins
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