The Velvet Room

 This is one of Madeleine's favorite writers.  She discovered the Egypt Game in middle school and recently introduced me to this one.  

The Velvet Room

Zilpha Keatly Snyder 1965

The heroine, Robin, is indeed a kindred spirit!  Set in the 1930's, Robin's family has to travel looking for temporary work and lodging.  When they end up at the McCurdy ranch and Robin finds an "abandoned" mansion to explore, the velvet room she discovers becomes her hideaway.  Snyder does an amazing job of weaving "magic" and mystery into a very relatable real story about an adolescent girl finding friends and navigating the hard things in life.  

After a while she gave up trying to go to sleep and pulled her cot over against the window.  Everything was strangely beautiful.  The dusty yard with its pile of auto parts looked different.  And the rest of the Village, too, seemed less ugly and makeshift.   It was as if the whole world had been slip-covered in the strange, soft fabric of moonlight.  Robin had never liked nighttime much.  She wasn't too brave about the dark, and then, too, things had a way of growing from bad to worse if you thought about them in the night.  But suddenly she saw things quite differently.  How wonderful it was that day ended- that there would always be hours that were soft and secret and dim to hide things for a while from the hard brightness of day.  She sat and watched until it was quite late; then a cool breeze began to blow in through the open window, and she went to sleep.

If you don't know this author, definitely track her down!