u/cemetery_acorns

Children’s fiction book

Read it in 4th or 5th grade ) 1980s possibly very early 1990s)

Not sure if hard or soft cover

English

Can’t remember any pictures

Library book or a book my teacher already owned

I feel like it took place in a knights and dragons type of world, however, I originally thought it was Edith Nesbit's The Last of the Dragons, so I can't be certain.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The\_Last\_of\_the\_Dragons

The biggest clue is one joke that has stayed with me for decades.
A young woman says something like:
"Oh, this makes me nervous."
The narrator then makes a humorous aside along the lines of:
"People hadn't always been nervous. It was something that had recently come into fashion."

I also remember a joke mentioning that aspirin had only recently been invented, or something very close to that. I don't think the characters were making the joke—I think it was the author stepping outside the story to make a modern observation about the past.

Fiction.

Pretty sure not Young Adult but more middle school age.

I read it in the late 1980s or early 1990s. I was in maybe 5th or 6th grade when I read it.

It was pretty scary, but still might have been age appropriate.

Story set in the 1970s or 1980s.

No chapters. Slim book. Paperback.

Can’t remember the cover, but it didn’t spoil the ending.

It was a library book.

Written in English.

The main character is a girl around 12 years old. Fairly certain she wasn’t a teen yet.

She travels by train to stay with her aunt because her aunt asked her to come for a visit.

The girl is forbidden to go upstairs to either the third floor or the attic.

Her uncle was a scientist and he’s dead. I don’t think the girl ever met him before he died.

Eventually, the girl discovers her male cousin hidden in the attic. They are very similar in age.

The uncle had experimented on his own son, leaving the boy hairy and ape-like and either can’t speak at all or is only able to say a few words.

The experiment might have been because the son was dying.

The son accidentally killed the father.

The aunt eventually locks the girl in the same room with the boy because she wants her son to have a companion.

The room is still filled with the father’s scientific equipment. It’s his old lab.

The final scene is the aunt answering a phone call from the girl's mother.

It was two weeks later. The mom took two weeks to call and check up on the girl. That seemed so weird.

The aunt tells the girl’s mother, “She never arrived."