66 Books Like Mindy's Mysterious Miniature

Imagine finding a beautiful dollhouse where its occupants reenact the night of a murder from decades ago…creepy, right? Betty Ren Wright’s The Dollhouse Murders is a unique ghost story where the ghosts communicate their tragic tale through miniature doll versions of themselves.

Its mystery and old family secrets make this book one of my all-time favorites. 

Alice and her mom move to a huge manor house where Alice's mom will take care of a rich old lady. Then Alice finds a dollhouse in the attic that's an exact replica of the house she's living in. (What is it about dollhouses hidden away in attics?) But the tale moves in a very different direction when Alice wakes up one morning to find a strange girl asleep next to her in her bed—a girl who looks just like a doll from the dollhouse. Where has she come from? What is her connection to the dollhouse, and to the unpleasant woman who owns it? 

I love the way this novel merges mystery and ghost story.  I was immediately hooked. 

A little wooden doll named Tottie is excited when an antique dollhouse is given to the children in her human family. But while the dollhouse itself is lovely, a dreadful doll named Marchpane comes with it.  She is a horror—and completely disrupts the harmonious life of the doll family. What to do? How can she be gotten rid of?  

This is a tale with a race against time, and an effort to restore balance to a damaged world. I especially love that the story is told from the doll’s point of view. Tottie is a sweet little thing, always worrying about others, but very determined to set things to rights before Marchpane ruins everything forever.

The Dollhouse family in this novel comes to life every Christmas. This year feels different because the three boys in their human family are growing up and don’t seem interested in playing with them. Worse still, the Dollhouse family learns that burglars are planning to break into the house and steal the valuables—and possibly the dollhouse itself. How can they warn the human family when the humans don’t even believe they are real? They make plan after desperate plan, and as each plan fails, they must come up with a solution before it is too late.

This story made me chuckle even as the plot thickens and the danger intensifies. I love the blend of fantasy and invention, and the satisfying ending.

“Slyvie had an amazing life, but she didn’t get to live it very often . . .” There are several fantasies about fictional characters breaking out of their books, but Roderick Townley’s is my favorite because it’s the most surprising. I loved this book because of the way it expresses the beauty and joy of reading and because of its exploration of what it means to break out of the outlines that other people draw for you and discover in yourself something completely new. 

This fascinating, gender-swapped Pinnochio retelling has a few hints of Frankenstein, and is gorgeously written. The main character, Pirouette, begins life as a tree and is carved into a puppet by her father, then brought to life by the magic of the blue moon. When the powerful Margrave of Tavia commissions Pirouette and her father to make one hundred wooden soldiers or risk imprisonment, they have no choice to comply. And then the Margrave makes an additional demand: he wants Pirouette to carve him a life-sized assassin—and then bring it to life. But is she making a monster or a masterpiece? And can she keep her own origins a secret?

As a person who loves words, loves stories, loves books, my eyes filled with tears reading and re-reading The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore to my children. The story was in part inspired by the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. Everything in Morris Lessmore’s life, including his own story, is scattered to the winds, but when he discovers a library filled “with the faint chatters of a thousand different stories as if each book was whispering an invitation to adventure,” his life is forever changed.

In a time of eBooks and apps, this story speaks to the power and allure of stories and the printed page that generations of us grew up with. As with the young girl who, like generations before her, opens the book pages at the end of this story, the story ends as it begins...

When it comes to building a world the readers can get involved in, you have to be careful not to reveal too much in the beginning. You want to captivate your readers, have them invest more and more time into exploring the world, allowing it to open up. The Ropemaker shows how well a fantasy story can be written this way. The distant and frightful empire is shrouded in mystery as Tilja and the others begin their adventure, but said mystery is slowly dismantled as they progress through their journey, coming to understand their enemy by living amongst them, all while seeking out a way to protect their home from invasion. 

The second of LeGuin’s Earthsea books is a story made of fantasy, adventure, horror, mystery, and myth. 

Tenar, the high priestess must choose between her lifelong training and her unexpected compassion for a thief named Ged, who she must execute in the Tombs of Atuan. Tenar leads Ged through darkness and terror to a place where she decides who she will become.

LeGuin’s prose is direct, evocative, and compelling. Read out loud, the story is spellbinding. It stays with me even though it’s years since my first reading. Each time I return to the fantastic yet entirely believable world she created, the characters I meet reveal some fresh insight into what it is to be human.

Take a sweeping YA adventure and magic and horses and a delicious book boyfriend all dropped on an outspoken, stubborn young woman thrown into a life she’s uniquely suited to and you have this delightful read from Robin McKinley. With a powerful heroine doing her best to understand her place, suspended between two distinct ways of life, The Blue Sword makes me want to run away from feeling out of place, awkward and never good enough and be just like Harry Crewe.