She’s a Doll takes the haunted-doll trope, flips it completely on its head, and turns the doll into the person we're rooting for. It's ridiculous, angry, surprisingly emotional, and WAY more fun than a book about a murdered woman trapped inside a tiny porcelain body has any right to be.

Lucy McQuinn is dead.

Kyle murdered her.

Unfortunately for Kyle, Lucy didn't exactly stay dead.

Instead, her consciousness ends up trapped inside an antique porcelain doll, leaving her eighteen inches tall, extremely breakable, and understandably fucking furious.

And Lucy wants revenge.

There's just one tiny problem with becoming an unstoppable vessel of female rage: being a doll is incredibly inconvenient.

That's where Nicola comes in.

Nicola is another outsider with her own reasons for hating Kyle, and the relationship that develops between her and Lucy ended up being one of my favorite parts of the entire book. I came into this expecting a campy revenge story about a murderous doll. I was NOT expecting to become emotionally invested in the friendship between a human woman and an angry little porcelain menace.

Their dynamic gives the book so much personality.

There's banter, absurdity, dark humor, and some genuinely ridiculous logistics involved in helping an eighteen-inch doll accomplish anything, let alone murder. But underneath all of that is a friendship between two women who understand what it's like to be dismissed, underestimated, and not believed.

And that's where the female rage actually works.

Lucy's anger isn't just there because murderous women are fun to read about. She's furious because her entire life was taken from her. Kyle gets to continue existing as the promising young man everyone wants to believe in while Lucy has been reduced to something people literally display on a shelf.

The book gets to be funny without forgetting how fucking awful that is.

I also loved that Lucy being a doll isn't treated like some convenient supernatural upgrade. It SUCKS. She's tiny. She's fragile. Communicating is difficult. Moving through the world requires help. Even after death, she has to figure out how to exist inside a body that doesn't work the way she wants it to.

That made the whole haunted-doll concept feel surprisingly fresh.

I did think the book lost a little momentum toward the end. There were places where I wanted the revenge plot to hit harder and get just a little nastier, especially after spending so much time building up Lucy's anger. A few pieces also wrapped up more quickly than I expected.

But I had such a good time getting there that it didn't bother me enough to seriously hurt the experience.

Because ultimately, this is a book about a murdered woman possessing a porcelain doll and teaming up with another woman to ruin the life of the man responsible.