Robin's character [in The Velvet Room] has far more facets than the usual sensitive child of fiction who needs a private place for dreaming. She is normally selfish and has a tough resilience behind her sensitivity. Her brothers and sisters are real children too. The reader, however, remembers not the realism of the rather stark tale of a migratory worker's family, but the magical aura through which an imaginative child sees the world.

Ruth Hill Viguers "Early Spring Booklist: 'The Velvet Room'," in The Horn Book Magazine, (copyright © 1965, by The Horn Book, Inc., Boston), Vol. XLI, No. 2, April, 1965, p. 173.

The jacket explains that the author wrote [Black and Blue Magic] especially for her son who "was tired of sad stories about girls and wished she would write a funny story about a boy." There is a lot here to make a young boy laugh in the eccentricities of...