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saroz162 's review for:
The Velvet Room
by Alton Raible, Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Snyder's second novel is the first one to really feel like a completed work, and it's a generally solid piece. What it lacks in the vaguely "supernatural" qualities that hallmark so many of her later books it makes up for in good, solid historical detail.
Robin's world is a depressing and gray 1937, with her ill father desperate to find work and many of the rest of the family earning their keep as peach pickers. (Snyder is almost certainly channeling some Steinbeck here.) And if Snyder's Mexican dialect is sadly (and unusually) stereotypical, her ability to sketch vivid characters from minimal material is very much in evidence, from Robin to her parents, the kind old lady Bonita to the rich girl Gwen. What the book really lacks is any urgency in the plot; it lopes lackadaisically along until Robin actually enters the eponymous velvet room some 70-odd pages in, and really only picks up when she discovers an old diary with a mystery. From there on, The Velvet Room develops more and more into classic Snyder - an enjoyable sophomore effort, with some hints of better stories to come.
Robin's world is a depressing and gray 1937, with her ill father desperate to find work and many of the rest of the family earning their keep as peach pickers. (Snyder is almost certainly channeling some Steinbeck here.) And if Snyder's Mexican dialect is sadly (and unusually) stereotypical, her ability to sketch vivid characters from minimal material is very much in evidence, from Robin to her parents, the kind old lady Bonita to the rich girl Gwen. What the book really lacks is any urgency in the plot; it lopes lackadaisically along until Robin actually enters the eponymous velvet room some 70-odd pages in, and really only picks up when she discovers an old diary with a mystery. From there on, The Velvet Room develops more and more into classic Snyder - an enjoyable sophomore effort, with some hints of better stories to come.