The Dollhouse, by Caris Cotter, for Timeslip Tuesday

This week's Timeslip Tuesday is The Dollhouse: A Ghost Story, by Caris Cotter...and I havered a bit about whether this was timeslip or, as the title would suggest, a ghost story, but I decided it counted as the former...

It's the story of Alice, a girl who's life is upended where her mother decides to leave her father after he once again puts work before family.  So instead of the long anticipated summer vacation together, Alice is dragged off by her mother to a remote mansion, where her mother will be the live in nurse for the old lady who recently bought the place who just had an accident, and Alice will be at loose ends.  The journey is inauspicious--their train has an accident, and Alice is left with a mild concussion.  And when they arrive at Blackwood house, grand and beautiful, Lily, the housekeeper's daughter who though 16 has the mind of a much younger child, shows Alice the bedroom she'll stay in, and confides that it is haunted.  

And indeed, when Alice wakes up the next morning, there in bed with her is a red headed girl.  Their brief meeting ends when Alice (not unnaturally) starts screaming her head off...and the girl is gone, and Alice's concussion is blamed for the experience.  Alice and Lily explore the house together, and a hidden stairway takes them up to the attic, where they find a marvelous miniature replica of Blackwood House.  One of the dolls looks just like the red headed girl...because she is (sort of).

This girl, Fizz, lived in the house back in the 1920s, and over the next few weeks Alice finds herself going back and forth from the present into Fizz's life, where only Fizz, and her old sister, Bubble (who is also developmentally delayed).  But it is not straight time travel--the dollhouse acts a conduit to the past, and when Alice changes things in the dollhouse, they change in reality.  The secrets and tensions of the past overlap with Alice's own worries, and Fizz's instance that Alice is in fact the dead ghost do nothing to sooth anybody's nerves...

And then tragedy upends Fizz's life, and that too is mirrored in what happens to Alice...

I really don't think there any actual ghosts, despite the title, just the ghostly memories of the past....unless you count the dollhouse, as a menacing ghostly power from the past, or perhaps Fizz showing up in Alice's time, waking up in the bedroom that used to be hers long ago....but Fizz never sticks around to do any actual haunting....so readers who go in expecting ghosts might be confused and disappointed. 

The one thing I didn't care for was the two girls, one in the past and one in the present, with developmental delays, described as being like "little girls"--they were too much like each other, sweet, innocent, happy, and un-three-dimensional, and that jarred a bit.  They seemed to be in the book to provide foils for Fizz's sharpness and Alice's vivid imagination (I guess), but while just one of them I could have accepted, having two felt forced.

(I have to be a bit spoilery to talk about the time travel, so if you are intrigued at this point, you can stop reading this now and go get ahold of the book--it is very good, full of mystery and emotion and tension, and the dollhouse and its wonderful miniatures is fascinatingly horrific to read about!)

This reminded me, timeslip wise, of Tom's Midnight Garden.  As is the case with that book, in which an old woman's memories are what creates the young boy's time travel, Alice is caught in Fizz's memories, tied strongly to the anchor of the dollhouse.  In both, time travel is a sort of tourism to the past; Alice doesn't affect any real change in Fizz's life, but I found it very satisfactory to read about.