Review: "The Secret of the Attic" by Sheri Cooper Sinykin

The Secret of the Attic by Sheri Cooper Sinykin
Published 1995 via Scholastic Inc.
★★★

I've been doing some quick childhood rereads recently, and this cropped up. I don't remember the plots of this series terribly well, but the covers give me this sweeping sense of nostalgia, and I hoped that maybe I'd remember more upon reading. That wasn't really the case here, but you never know—maybe one of the later books (the cover of Cowgirl Megan gives me some of the strongest nostalgia of the bunch, though Keisha the Fairy Snow Queen isn't far behind) will deliver.

The Secret of the Attic was published in 1995, and it's definitely a reminder that diversity in books at the time was, like...one of them is blonde! One of them is a brunette! One of them is a redhead! One of them is Black (African American, in the 90s)! And they don't all celebrate the same holidays—one of them is Jewish, and one of them celebrates Kwanzaa! I'm now wondering whether this book is partially responsible for my brief confusion as a kid about Kwanzaa; all the Black kids I knew (in my racially-and-socioeconomically-but-not-otherwise-very diverse elementary school) celebrated Christmas, but I remember being very confused by that because the message I'd gotten from books and, I think, school was that Black people didn't celebrate Christmas because they celebrated Kwanzaa instead. (It is obvious to me now that these things are not mutually exclusive, but at the time...)

The other thing of note now, which I certainly wouldn't have noticed at the time, is that it's actually pretty creepy that a bunch of kids meet a strange woman who is so enthusiastic about them going to play in her attic. Granted, the book takes pains to make it not creepy—the kids regularly check in with their parents, who are familiar with the strange woman—but even so, I hope that if someone had told me to run along and play in their attic when I was a kid I'd have maintained a healthy level of suspicion...? On the other hand, I hope even as an adult that a magic attic will crop up and I'll get to have a bunch of random adventures, so.