Does Ken play the Nutcracker or the Mouse King? You’ll have to read to find out for yourself!Īnd you’ll have to wait until July for The Story of Barbie and the Woman Who Created Her by Cindy Eagan and Amy Bates, but this picture book biography of Ruth Handler is worth the wait.

Barbie stars as Clara in this retelling of the classic ballet. If we were to highlight one, it would be seasonal favorite, Barbie: The Nutcracker(A Little Golden Book). Of course, there is a cornucopia of official Barbie books from which to select. When the doll is unwrapped, Nella takes the doll and refuses to share before realizing – even with a really cool doll – it’s no fun to play by yourself. But Nella’s really hoping that this year she and her two sisters will each get a beautiful Baby Betty doll. Set during the Great Depression, Santa Claus doesn’t deliver presents to Nella’s family every year. McKissack and Jerry Pinkney, is the perfect holiday doll book. We can’t pretend the holidays are barreling down upon us, and The All-I’ll-Ever-Want Christmas Doll by the late, great Patricia C. Soon, though, both girls realize how much more wonderful creative play can be. But when she sees her friend Sophie’s “perfect” storebought house, her pride wavers. A little girl proudly walks readers through her handmade dollhouse, pointing out the wallpaper she drew, the fancy clothes she made, and the little elevator she made out of a paper cup. It may lack a hot-pink palette and waterslide, but the dollhouse in Giselle Potter’s This Is My Dollhouse is a true testament to one girl’s creativity and imagination. (Now Franz Kafka’s Barbie is a movie I’d also like to see!)

In 1923, when he encountered a girl distraught over the loss of her doll, the writer put his chops to the test by sending the girl letters in the hand of the doll, whom he suggested was traveling the world on grand adventures. If you like stories about dolls, but wished they intersected more with modernist literature, Kafka and the Doll by Larissa Theule and Rebecca Green is the picture book for you! The author of some of the more surreal and absurd stories of the twentieth century was not inured to the charms of a doll. But everything changes when a giant (!) opens the dollhouse and introduces her to the larger world, whether she likes it or not. Gemma lives in a forgotten dollhouse with her doll parents, never growing old and living a monotonous existence. A little doll’s world is blown wide open in Gemma and the Giant Girl by Sara O’Leary and Marie Lafrance.

Kafka doll book