Soldier doll

Jennifer Gold

"When Elizabeth spots an antique doll dressed in a soldier's uniform at a local garage sale, she thinks that it might be a good last-minute birthday gift for her dad, who's about to ship out to Afghanistan. But is it more special? Could it be the very soldier doll that inspired a famous poem written during World War I? In finding the doll, Elizabeth has become the latest link in a chain of love and loss that began in England during World War I, when a young woman gave the doll to her fiancé before he left to join the fighting in Europe. From there to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, to a Czech concentration camp in World War II, and on to a young American soldier in Vietnam in the 1970s, the doll has been passed from hand to hand, in moments of both hope and sadness. Is the little soldier a good luck charm, or an unlucky foreteller of death? Now its fate lies in the hands of Elizabeth, who...