Blow Out the Moon by Libby Koponen

together. Usually in them a new girl came, and the other girls made fun of her and teased her and didn’t like her at first — and then she did something heroic and everyone liked her a lot.
    Or sometimes the girls had adventures together: The adventure usually started at night with someone putting on her dressing gown and getting a torch (that’s what they call a flashlight). I was surprised that they always had torches with batteries and bulbs that worked; each time they’d get the torch I’d wonder if this time the battery or bulb would be dead, but it never was.
    And there was always a scene of a midnight feast: In the middle of the night, they would get up, put on their dressing gowns, light their torches, and spread food on a blanket.
    So that was another good thing, reading. I read like that until one Saturday Jill took us to a toy store.

Chapter Twelve:
    The Dolls
    It was more like a room in an old-fashioned house than a toy store.
    The best things were in a long wooden case with a glass top and glass front. Inside were dolls — not big dolls, but dollhouse dolls. I never liked dolls in America: Their faces didn’t look real at all.

    Two of the dolls, as they looked when they were in the store.
    But these were not like any dolls I’d ever seen — their faces had real expressions. They were about as long as my fingers: the children as long as my little finger, the grownups the size of my middle finger. We looked through the case for a long time, until the man behind it asked, very politely, if we’d like him to take any of the dolls out for us so we could “see them properly.” He talked to us just as though we were grown-up ladies and he was a grown-up gentleman — he almost bowed!

    The doll Libby, when she was very old, almost falling apart — I took the picture while I was writing this book so you could see her.
    We pointed to the ones we liked best, and he set them down on the counter and said we could hold them, and we thanked him and did hold them.
    The legs AND arms bent and so did the bodies, so you could put them in any pose. Their feet were in metal shoes, so they didn’t bend, and their heads didn’t bend, but the necks did. They would even be able to RIDE. We looked and looked.
    Finally, I picked out a boy with shorts and brown hair and kind of a sweet but mischievous expression. I decided to get him and a girl with a very short dress (yellow) and short curly brown hair. She had a sweet, wistful face. I got her and named her Emmy.
    Emmy got a girl and a boy, too. The girl had kind of an angry expression, curly hair, and a white dress with red and blue lines that made squares. She was a little taller than my Emmy; Emmy named her girl Libby.
    There was also a baby with long, curly blonde hair and a long pink nightgown — but we didn’t have enough money to get her, or any grown-ups (the grown-ups cost more, and besides, we could wait to get them). And the things they had to go WITH the dolls! All kinds of furniture, with drawers that really opened; a pink telephone with a tiny dialer that really turned. … But we could get them later; the important thing was that we had the dolls. I could hardly wait to get home and play with them.
    Once we had the dolls, every day was fun — at least after school.
    The mothers were both very frivolous: They spent all their time going shopping and talking about clothes and going to the theater. The fathers were very quiet and spent most of their time reading (we made books by cutting out the pictures of books advertised in magazines and pasting them onto folded-up paper). None of the parents paid any attention to the adventurous children, so the kids could do whatever they wanted.
    THE BEST THINGS WERE:
    • a wooden case about half the length of my little finger. The outside was polished, shining wood; inside, it was lined with green baize (that’s like velvet, only rougher) and divided into three tiny compartments holding tiny silver knives, spoons,