All hail the Queen! Imaginative play permits participants to control their environment and fate when reality does not afford the same. Three children, Poppy, Zach, and Alice, decide to make an eerie porcelain doll their ruler and assign her the power to dictate the flow of a series of games they dream up. As they continue to mature, their pretend world is threatened when Zach is forced to "put away childish things" when William the Blade, a toy and key player, is discarded by his father. William conceals his outrage by pretending that he has become too old for toys and abandons the girls. Poppy is then haunted by the Queen who is revealed in her dreams to be the ghost of Eleanor Kerchner in limbo, desperately desiring to be buried near her family in Ohio. The Queen thus commissions a final journey that will reveal actual facts about the Kerchner family, Alice's true feelings about Zach and the real reason why he quit the games before she is finally laid to rest.
Upper elementary and middle school language arts teachers could utilize this text to illuminate literary elements like suspense, irony, plot development, characterization, and of course symbolism. The "burying" of the doll symbolically represents maturation and the closing of one chapter (childhood) to open another (adolescence).
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