Casey Stuart is a tomboyish seventh-grade football quarterback who has pulled away from her old friends after her mother’s death two years earlier. The pain of that loss colors her days, and a tense relationship with a boy on the team crops up as she clings to her grief. One day, while wandering into Past Pages Bookstore, she discovers a mysterious volume titled The Book of Awakenings. The book lays out a bold, dangerous plan: resurrection is possible, but it becomes permanent unless the spell is undone before sunset on the fourth day after it begins. Yet the book carries a catch—it’s expensive, so Casey leaves all the money she has in a glass-fronted compartment on the shelf, a risk she’s willing to take for a chance to bring her mother back.
Driven by longing, Casey sets out to collect artifacts from her mother’s life, including locks of hair kept in her hairbrush. She hopes the magic will restore her mother, but fate intervenes when Drew McDonald, a woman who works with and is involved with Casey’s widowed father, Ben, brings Casey a doll named Eve. The doll is a plastic fashion figure, crafted by Marathon Toys and designed to inhabit a full spectrum of adult roles—from law enforcement to medicine to outer space—and it lives in Sunnyvale, a small, glossy hub in the middle of America. Eve is introduced with every promise of being a perfect stand-in for a real person.
As Casey prepares to perform the incantation, Drew comes by with a birthday Eve doll and uses the hairbrush to brush the doll’s hair. With strands from the Eve doll lingering on the brush as Casey uttered the spell, the magic targets the doll rather than Casey’s mother. The next morning, Casey wakes to find Eve in bed beside her, a fully grown, living woman. Casey is unsettled, while Eve is exhilarated at the chance to live as a real person.
What follows is a sneakily tender and comic stretch of trials and discoveries. Eve, navigating a world she’s only studied in plastic, quickly becomes involved in everyday life: she buys clothes at the mall, tests her police instincts by stopping a truck that nearly hits Casey, tastes food for the first time, and fumbles at secretarial work. She even performs on stage at a corporate event with Ben, and she nearly sets the house on fire in the kitchen. Through these misadventures, Eve also helps Casey cope with her mother’s absence, offering comfort and perspective that Casey hasn’t allowed herself to feel. Meanwhile, Casey learns that restoring life requires the second volume of the book—a detail that raises the stakes and heightens the tension between Casey and her father, who is preoccupied with a promotion at his law firm and with the strain that Eve’s presence creates in his personal life.
As the days pass, Eve proves that she can be more than a novelty—she helps people become better versions of themselves, including Ellen, Ben’s coworker, and she grows into a companion who listens to Casey and offers honest, if unconventional, advice. The two form a genuine friendship: Eve brings warmth and insight, and Casey teaches Eve how to be a relatable, likable figure rather than just a new toy. Yet Casey’s growing attachment to Eve makes the prospect of undoing the spell increasingly painful, and she ultimately decides not to buy the second volume when it arrives at the local bookstore.
Still, Eve’s longing to belong pushes her toward a choice of her own. Feeling homesick and conscious of the toy market’s fickle dynamics, she decides to undo the spell herself. She purchases the second volume, says goodbye to Ben during Casey’s championship game, and makes her way to Marathon’s Sunnyvale room. There, in a tearful farewell, she chants the incantation, and Casey and Ben arrive in time to witness Eve’s transformation back into a doll. The moment is bittersweet, but it is not the end of Eve’s story: as time passes, she becomes a popular toy once again, and Casey maintains her friendships while Ben earns a promotion and Drew sends him to lunch with a smile.
The film closes with a joyful dance number to Eve’s theme song, Be a Star, as a still-real Eve appears to sing and dance alongside the cast, signaling a hopeful balance between fantasy and real life.
