Behind the Attic Wall

the long version

Behind the Attic Wall is a children's novel by Sylvia Cassedy, first published in 1983. At twelve, Maggie had been thrown out of more boarding schools than she cared to remember. "Impossible to handle," they said — nasty, mean, disobedient, rebellious, thieving — anything they could say to explain why she must be removed from the school. Maggie was thin and pale, with shabby clothes and stringy hair, when she arrived at her new home. "It was a mistake to bring her here," said Maggie's great-aunts, whose huge stone house looked like another boarding school — or a prison. But they took her in anyway. After all, aside from Uncle Morris, they were Maggie's only living relatives. But from behind the closet door in the great and gloomy house, Maggie hears the faint whisperings, the beckoning voices. And in the forbidding house of her ancestors, Maggie finds magic...the kind that lets her, for the first time, love and be loved.