A Curtained Library Alcove

Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Velvet Room, Cover art by Alton Raible

I was joking about a blog to review potty-training books.  Then I fell asleep thinking about it, and dreamed I wrote about every book I’d ever read, and it was a good dream.   

I’ve only ever bothered to write about books when they bug me (Twilight; Harry Potter 6).  So as a challenge, I will start by describing my first Favorite Book Ever, which is also a book about a girl named Robin who loves to read books. 

Robin is a daydreamer who tends to wander off from her daily life in search of a quiet corner to curl up with a book.  Wouldn’t it be amazing if she got an antique key from a mysterious old woman in a forest cottage, and it unlocked a secret passage in a vacant well, and she discovered a velvet-curtained library alcove in a deserted mansion? And a mysterious diary written 50 years earlier by a girl who lived there?  If you are 11 and named Robin, this might be the coolest story ever.  

Snyder writes children’s books with pitch-perfect historic and emotional authenticity.  The characters, the rhythm, the secrets of The Velvet Room are perfectly scaled to its genre and setting: A preteen story about a Dust-bowl family making their way through California’s orange groves and peach pitting sheds. Even where the mystery is cliche (who could the girl from the diary be?), it’s not naive.  The Bad Guys  may be clumsy teen thugs, but Robin’s terror is real when they chase her. 

I think this is because it is awesome, not because I was just a kid when I read it.  25 years later, my memories of this book are sensory:  The sting of the peach juice where the knife nicked her fingers.  The smoke of the peat pots under the orange trees, the cool stone walls of the well. The enclosed safety of the Velvet Room, a  musty dream nestled in the dilapidated reality of a crumbling past.  At the end, the comfortable, yellow-and-white bed where she wakes up after the fire — not alone in the dark velvet alcove, but welcomed by friends and family in the hopeful  sunshine. 

The ending used to bug me — I’d rather sink into the red velvet cushions and disappear into the dream world of the diary — and the real world is gritty and glaring, even when it’s sweet.  But that’s the point.  Anyone who ever finished Grapes of Wrath, thinking wow, some of them must’ve fared a little better, couldn’t they find some work pitting peaches and set up house in a shabby but clean little cabin? What would that be like? Especially for the kids? Should pick up this book.

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