Velvety Memories Cushion Re-Reading

The Velvet Room by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Dear Saralinda:*

For several years I've been searching for a book my cousin gave me when I was eight. She wasn't much of a reader, but this book featured two characters who shared our names. Bridgette was an old woman and Robin was the main character-a young girl who was the middle child of a migrant family. The book also had several suspenseful elements in it and my cousin favored horror and ghost stories.

Unfortunately, that was all I could remember of the book and while our names are not common ones, they were precious little information on which to track down a book. So you can imagine how pleased I was when I discovered it while trolling through used books at the library's Book Burrow. I'd liked some of the recent books I'd read by Zilpha Keatley Snyder and wanted to see what other stuff she had. I picked up one that looked unfamiliar, read the back cover and gasped aloud as I realized it was the book I'd been looking for.

The Velvet Room is the story of Robin and her family during the Great Depression. They'd suffered a great deal of losses and had little left to their name except a broken-down car and a few dollars-hardly enough to support this family of seven. The book opens when they arrive on a farm that is hiring migrant workers. They're given a small shack to live in and told they can stay there permanently if the father's work is acceptable.

The father, though, is prone to illness. His health is delicate and he isn't really cut out for the hard labor of a farm. He does it, though, and Robin and her siblings are able to go to school for the first time in many years. Robin is unhappy at not having a permanent place she can call her own and hesitates to make friends knowing how soon they might be uprooted.

One friend she does make, though, is with an older woman named Bridgette. Bridgette is a sort of hermit who lives near an abandoned house with several interesting animals. Many of the children in the village think she is a witch, but Robin bonds with her immediately. It is Bridgette who gives Robin the key to the secret room referred to in the title, a room that becomes a safe haven for Robin.

Like most of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's books, there are plenty of rumors about ghosts, witches, and hauntings. However, this book has a strong streak of realism and the supernatural only tinges the book. It is primarily a period piece. We are plopped into the world of the 30s and we see it through the eyes of a lonely child living in a crowded environment.

I was also surprised to find that the story was not nearly as suspenseful as I remembered it. Perhaps that is because somewhere in the recesses of my memory lay the outcome of the story, an outcome that relieved some (though not all) of the fears that haunt a reader the first time through.

The Velvet Room does display Snyder's characteristically sensitive handling of the thoughts of a pre-teen girl. I sometimes wonder whether Snyder ever really grew up because she has such a strong awareness of the mind of a young girl. She is never condescending and she is able to communicate their worries and insecurities without exaggerating or stereotyping them.

Snyder also has an incredible sense of place. I'm not normally one who enjoys descriptive passages, but the velvet room in this book does have a certain memorable magic to it. When I re-read the book, I was instantly transported back to the first time I read the book as a pre-teen. I could smell the mustiness of the room, I could remember exactly what I was doing and how I was sitting when I first read it. Snyder had created a place that had become a part of my memory even though I visited it only through her words. There was a resonance with that room that rang even all these years later.

The Velvet Room was out of print for a long time, but according to Snyder's website, it is about to be re-released by iUniverse. It's a fact I find encouraging. While the book may be slower than many of the stories published today, it still has a great deal of charm, insight, and suspense. It's a good summer read.

Love,
Aunt Bridgette

* I've changed the name of my niece to protect her identity. Saralinda is a name I borrowed from another beloved children's book. She's the princess in James Thurber's The 13 Clocks.

--B. Redman