rachelmanija | Behind the Attic Wall, by Sylvia Cassedy

Twelve-year-old orphan Maggie flames out of a succession of schools, as she’s decided that since everyone will hate her anyway, the best thing to do is make sure that happens immediately to skip the disappointment. She’s then sent to live with two awful aunts and a very strange uncle in a giant house where she discovers two living dolls and a living china dog in the attic.

I read this book when I was a kid and found it memorable without actually liking it, partly because I was very confused by the ending. I re-read it to see if the ending would make more sense as an adult, and also if I’d like it more. (Respectively, sort of and no.)

Maggie has two habits which make sense under the circumstances, but which did not endear her to me. One was her method of pre-emptively making people hate her, which was to be as mean and obnoxious as possible. The other is a mental game in which she explains ordinary things to the imaginary “Backwoods Girls,” who have never heard of anything, while she calls them stupid. This is present throughout the book, and goes on and on and ON for page after page after page. It was beyond tedious.

Her aunts are plain terrible. Her uncle is clearly supposed to be endearing, but he speaks entirely in unfunny whimsical jokes and flights of fancy, and literally never says anything normal ever, not even when it’s clear that his “humor” is confusing and upsetting Maggie.

The living dolls are in an extremely Uncanny Valley in that I think they’re supposed to be slightly creepy but mostly lovable, but came across to me as mostly creepy but not in a scary or fun/scary way. They’re dolls possessed or animated by the spirits of Maggie’s ancestors who died in a fire, and sit drinking imaginary tea and reading the newspaper headline about their death without ever understanding that’s what it is, and having the same conversations over and over and over. This afterlife seems more subtly horrific than sweet to me, especially as the way they keep looping through the same conversations and not remembering things is unintentionally reminiscient of dementia. Or maybe that is intentional, who knows.

Maggie gets angry and smashes the dolls around, cracking the male doll’s head and knocking off the dog’s ear and detaching the woman doll’s leg. She fixes them later, but damaging inanimate but sentient things, especially if they feel pain as these dolls do, is a huge squick/creep-out for me and did not endear her to me.

I like a lot of stuff that’s dark in some way or another, whether it’s scary horror or just deals with dark topics, but this book just felt unpleasant and unenjoyable.

Spoilers!

I read some reviews that said that the dolls are imaginary and Maggie is just creative and/or hallucinating. I don’t think this is supported by the text, as she learns things from the dolls that she only confirms later, and obtains items from the dolls that are from the past. Still, it is the sort of book where that reading isn’t totally out of the blue. She does hear the dolls as voices no one else can hear long before she finds them.

There is never any explanation of why her ancestors and their dog are now dolls, whether they’re animating pre-existing dolls or were literally transformed into dolls, or if everyone in the family becomes dolls after death or if it’s just them.

The dolls revert to being inanimate when Maggie is caught by her aunts with them. They only come alive again when the uncle dies and Maggie is about to be sent away again. The ending very clearly implies that the uncle is about to join them as a doll himself. This is played as heartwarming but I found it creepy. Though I have to say, he and his inability to have a sane conversation ever would fit right in!

When I was a kid, I thought probably the uncle had become a doll, but I wasn’t completely sure as you don’t actually see this and it’s not explicitly stated. Reading it now, it’s clear that he definitely becomes a doll.

So, when Maggie dies, will she too join the dolls in the attic? EEK!

Did any of you read this book? Did you like it better than I did? It’s widely beloved and won lots of awards, but appears to be currently out of print.

Behind the Attic Wall

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Date: 2019-07-16 06:27 pm (UTC)

From:

sovay

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Did any of you read this book? Did you like it better than I did?

I can remember that I read the book, because the living china dog was vivid to me, but nothing else about it. The mental space occupied by reading it seems to have been taken up by other doll books like Rumer Godden's The Dolls' House (1947).

Date: 2019-07-16 06:30 pm (UTC)

From:

rachelmanija

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Which is also incredibly dark! The heroine's mom burns to death before her eyes!

Are dolls the children's book equivalent of dogs?

I like The Doll's House a lot better too.

Date: 2019-07-16 06:46 pm (UTC)

From:

sovay

no subject

The heroine's mom burns to death before her eyes!

And that's how I learned that celluloid is flammable!

(I can't actually be sure of that, but I do think it was the first piece of fiction I read where it's a plot point.)

Are dolls the children's book equivalent of dogs?

I feel like dogs are more tear-jerking death, less uncanny valley. Dolls are almost always uncanny valley. I don't necessarily recommend re-reading Lynne Reid Banks' The Indian in the Cupboard (1980)—I tried a few years ago—but that's another book with a nightmare fuel premise presented as charming fantastical conceit (which, as I recall, gets increasingly WTF as the series goes on).

I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance

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