Lucy McQuinn arrives at Ginger Béliveau’s party in a top hat, tails and a bow tie the size of a dinner plate, carrying six bottles of fizzy pink vodka. It is a tea party, she has been told, so she has come as the Hatter. Everyone else is in satin and chiffon, the hostess’s mother takes her for a famous chocolatier, and the bottles are swept off and hidden in the fridge before anyone else can see them. She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove opens with this exquisitely awkward afternoon because everything after it, including a killing, grows out of one young woman’s certainty that she does not belong in the room.
A Ghost Who Used to Apologise
Lucy goes home early, rings her best friend for comfort and gets the friend’s twin brother, who is kind on the phone and then turns up at her door. The novel names him as her murderer at once. Its interest lies elsewhere, in what becomes of a person whose last living choices were all made out of politeness: letting him in, shutting her barking dog away so he would feel welcome, pretending to sip from his bottle.
Death, in the novel’s comic logic, cures her of manners. The Lucy who wakes inside her grandmother’s porcelain bride is foul-mouthed, furious and funny, and she spends weeks screaming at the only person who can hear her, a former classmate named Nicola who now stacks shelves at a thrift shop. The best sequence in the first third is quietly hilarious: the broken doll’s price tag, taped to a glass cabinet, is marked down again and again until Nicola, worn ragged by a voice no one else hears, buys her for small change just to make it stop.
What follows in a backyard shed, with Nicola demanding proof and Lucy offering it in the most unglamorous form imaginable, is the hinge of She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove. A hallucination becomes a houseguest, and the book becomes a friendship story.
Truelove is just as good on the life Lucy has lost. Her grandmother, who raised her after her mother died, fills a cramped house with boxes, birdcages and old novels, hangs a cross-stitch of a raised middle finger by the front door and argues happily with her granddaughter about Jane Austen. Those pages are brief, but they give She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove a moral centre: this is a book about a poor, bookish, slightly odd girl from the wrong end of a small town, and about who gets believed when such a girl disappears.
The Real Romance in She’s a Doll
The pleasure of the middle chapters is the double act. Nicola is cynical, lonely and frightened of Kyle Lawson for reasons she will not discuss, and she wants evidence and a courtroom. Lucy wants a corpse. Their bargaining is written as bickering, and the bickering is often wonderful, full of mock rent demands and pedantic arguments about who actually killed Dracula. Underneath it sits a sharp, unsentimental account of two women who were each failed by a town that preferred not to believe them, and who find in each other the first listener either has had in years.
One of the finest scenes takes place at night, halfway up a flimsy ladder, when Nicola freezes with fear and Lucy talks her through it by asking about her life. The confession that tumbles out (degrees abandoned, hearing lost, a homecoming nobody celebrated) is the moment the book stops being a revenge caper and becomes a portrait of two people grieving different things. Lucy’s half-buried crush on the girl who threw that tea party threads through the same chapters, handled with a tenderness that makes it one of the most convincing queer coming-of-age strands in recent horror.
The best friend, Krissy, is the book’s quiet tragedy. Her refusal to see what her twin is drives some of the bleakest turns, and She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove is shrewd about how loyalty and denial can look exactly alike from the outside.
Where the Novel Loses Its Grip
The trouble is that the novel loves its own refrains. Lucy’s three anguished questions about her death return so often that they stop wounding, and the quarrels in the second half follow a pattern: outburst, hiding, apology, truce. A few very short chapters exist only to restate that the monster was always just a man, a point the story had already made with more force. Readers will also notice how much of the endgame depends on convenience, and how quickly one long-estranged figure is forgiven once the plot needs her. The wrap-up, delivered largely through gossip and online posts, feels hurried after such a carefully built climax.
There is a moral question here too, and the book is happier raising it than settling it. Nicola argues for exposure and due process, Lucy for blood, and the final act is less interested in weighing the cost of vengeance than in letting its heroine feel it. Some readers will find that cathartic and earned after so much helplessness; others will wish the narrative had pushed back harder against its narrator.
The opening pages carry a note from a character warning that Lucy bends small truths, and the book does reward readers who take that seriously. She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove handles murder, sexual violence and abuse, suicidal feeling, grief, heavy profanity and one memorable arachnid; the violence of the finale is graphic, though nothing sexual happens on the page.
Where She’s a Doll Came From
Truelove has said in interviews that reading Grady Hendrix’s How to Sell a Haunted House made her think it was hard not to cheer for a haunted toy, given what a miserable life a doll must lead, and that she has been writing since she was nine. Her acknowledgments trace the idea to a stay in a deconsecrated church with some of the stranger members of her book club, and she confesses to writing the novel on a temperamental laptop she named after Victor Frankenstein. The book appeared on 8 September 2026 through Ezeekat Press, the imprint that the BookTok creator Jaysen Headley runs at Bindery Books, which selects titles with its reading community.
Readers who enjoyed her earlier space-horror novel, Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove, will recognise the same gift for an inhuman narrator with a very human ache, and She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove is the more personal of the two.
For company on the shelf, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold offers the gentler, more mournful version of a murdered girl watching the living, while Pet Sematary by Stephen King shares this book’s conviction that grief, left alone with a plan, makes terrible decisions.
Final Thoughts
Much of the novel’s charm lives in small things: a battered copy of Lewis Carroll, a mastiff who knows his owner in any body, a lopsided doll insisting, against all evidence, that she likes her new legs. It repeats itself and rushes its ending, but it is rare to find a horror novel this funny that also takes grief this seriously. She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove earns its laughs and its tears in roughly equal measure.
Some ghosts haunt houses. This one would rather haunt a man.