’tis the season for us to crowdsource our hazy childhood book memories. Do you have a vague recollection of reading a great book, but you can’t quite place the title or author? I’ll start us off.
I’ve done this once before, but I have two new ones to add, and one straggler I’m still trying to place. To prove there are happy endings, Mallory swore no one could help her find her own white whale, and I found it on Google Books in, like, ten minutes.
Okay, help me out with mine, then share yours in the comments!
1. It’s a girl whose mom is dead, and she has, like, a book of leaves that her mom had pressed, and she and her dad move to a new house, and I think her dad marries a new wife with a kid, and the kid destroys the book of leaves.
2. Dystopian underground society, boy is trained from birth to remember strings of numbers, eventually has to, like, use this ability to activate/deactive a weapon? Chilly father figure.
3. This one is NOT Half Magic. It’s a kid who gets sent back to Arthurian times during a field trip, or some such thing, and his mom is too, and she keeps waiting for the cream tea she was promised in the brochure. This one is making me really nuts, so please help.
Hold off on your hazy movie memories, we’re playing THAT game later this week.
Image via allegator
Tags: books, help us all, memories, misty rose-coloured memories
This is a picture book, and it scared me green when I was about four. It’s a “Learn About Germs” kind of book, and one of the illustrations is a rabid dog foaming at the mouth (I’m serious). Despite/because of its totally terrifying me, I read it and reread it and criiied and I’d love to see that picture again.
Did it involve a little boy getting bitten by the rabid dog and tiny soldiers in a syringe??
I don’t remember, but it doesn’t sound totally wrong?
We had a book about Louis Pasteur, germs and rabies. There was totally an illustration of a rabid, foaming dog. I think it was part of a series about “believing in yourself” or some such. I can still see that dog!
THAT IS ABSOLUTELY IT. Thank you so much. I sort of can’t believe this was made available to me as a small child: http://img0.etsystatic.com/000/0/5305041/il_570xN…
YES!!! That dog effed him up! Nothing traumatizing about a bloody, bitten child. Nothing at all.
I REMEMBER THIS BOOK. That WAS pretty messed up.
AHHH my grandparents had this book in their “toy cupboard”. I kind of credit it for making me interested in science (little men go in your body and fix you? COOL SIGN ME UP)
I went and read the Amazon reviews, and it seems small children have a either a visceral I SHALL BECOME A DOCTOR or BRB WEEPING IN TERROR reaction to it. So, good for you, polarizing text–at least you’re memorable.
OH THANK YOU SO MUCH NICOLE
Ok. So it was sci-fi, pretty slim. Middle-grade, probably? I read it when I was in middle school, at any rate, and got it from my school library. A group of colonists, I think, on a massive spaceship, and there were these aliens they encountered at one point, who, like, nested in the huge atrium/farmspace on the ship. The aliens were sort of like moths, I believe, and they had a very short lifecycle — the image of them all slowly and quietly dying has haunted me for years. It wasn’t scary at all, just very poignant.
The book I would love to find again was an elementary-school-reading-level book I got from a mail-order book club that specialized in such things. It was about an elementary-school kid who lived in a city (can’t remember if it was a boy or a girl) who took violin lessons and was really obsessed with getting a vibrato. He or she finally gets it at the end of the book, I think, possibly after the big recital. Also the protagonist was friends with an older violinist who played on street corners, and I remember being fascinated with that friendship.
The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt. I read this as a kid, but the real reason I remember is that my mom used to teach it in her fifth grade class and had to grade a book report on it where one kid called it a “vibrator” the whole time. e.g. “She just couldn’t wait to get her vibrator. She wanted it SO BAD!” It has become a family favorite in terms of awesome teaching stories.
I believe the favorite quote also involved something like, “All day long, Minna thinks about her vibrator.”
Yaaaay! That does ring all of the bells. Thank you!
Also, greatest anecdote ever.
OMG, must tell this story to my husband, a violinist and school orchestra director, IMMEDIATELY.
I totally remember this book! … just not its name. Some Googling led me to “The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt” which sounds pretty close.
The fact and fictions of minna Pratt!!
Yes! “The Facts & Fictions of Minna Pratt” by Patricia MacLachlan – I loved this book SO MUCH, I can’t even remember how many times I’ve read it. (I think I may have to reread it this week!)
I remember this book! I was learning to play the violin when I read it. Figuring out the vibrato was rather less dramatic for me in real life than it was for the girl in the book.
It was a YA coming-of-age book about a teenage girl, and there was a big scene with a makeout party where they played spin the bottle, I think? I also remember her talking a lot about this quilt she had and wanting to just hide in it instead of getting up. Lots of autumnal colors on the cover. Wow, this might win for vaguest.
You would not be referring to “Wonder,” would you? Where her friend tells her she looks like Wonder Bread in her polka-dot dress?
Wonder is by Rachel Vail, if that helps the OP look it up! I think Vail had a couple of other books with spin-the-bottle scenes, maybe.
Ooh, that sounds really familiar. Thanks for the author, I kept coming up with another book when I tried to look it up before. I’ll check it out!
You hit something in my brain. I think the book you’re looking for is by Barthe DeClements, who wrote Fourth Grade Wizards. I had a teacher who had all her books and so I read them voraciously.
Is it Karen Kepplewhite Is The World’s Best Kisser?
I’m pretty sure you’re talking about a Judy Blume book . . . Deenie, maybe?
It sounds like Judy Blume, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. She is a young teen, one parent is Christian, the other Jewish. She’s trying to figure out what she believes, waiting for her first menstrual cycle and doesn’t want to be the last one of her friends to get it, waiting for her first kiss, lots of angst. Very funny.
Okay, so it was a picture book-type thing, big glossy pages, watercolor illustrations, definitely not part of the D’Aulaires’ book. I read it in third grade (so…1996ish?) and gave a show-and-tell report on it. The story was a Greek myth that I’ve never been able to find anywhere else: Artemis was jealous that Zeus had given Apollo a chariot driven by twelve silver swans, so Zeus took the chariot away from Apollo and gave it to Artemis…and then turned around and gave Apollo another (better) chariot, driven by twelve golden swans.
Not sure about this, but just wanted to put in a note that I LOVE the D’Aulaire’s book.
Me too. Doris Gates had a series of books about individual Greek gods, including one on A&A. That might be it? There’s also an Orchard Collection of GMs that has watercolors, I think.
BENEDICT! <3
That illustration, right? DREAMTASTIC.
mmmmmm.
YA sci-fi/fantasy, read in mid-90s. Protagonist girl whose name was a long string of numbers and letters but was abbreviated to Amity or Amy because those were the capital letters in it. Title might have had “door” or “tunnel” in it? She escapes from domed city to outdoor environment with fairy-like creatures? She has a friend who is in a relationship who has to meet her lover in a “privacy booth”; Amy uses these booths for secret planning but not romantic rendezvouses.
I have been looking for a book about a kid who is tired of school and runs into a company that is manufacturing replicas of kids as robots to send to school for them and the kid ends up moving to another house in his neighborhood while the robot kids go to school and do their chores. Sort of Stepford Wives but for kids and from the kid point of view. Read in 5th or 6th grade in late 70s.
I don’t know this one but I’d like to read it! That sounds awesome.
Yes! I’m trying to find it too! More details: the girl who gets the replica just wants to sit around and eat junk food all day. I’m thinking twinkies, ho-ho’s, that sort of thing. Eventually she gets tired of it. The scientist/director of the place that creates the robots chastises the girl for losing weight and no longer resembling her replica. The girl grows to fear that her mom likes the replica/robot better than her because it behaves perfectly, does well in school, etc. Things get really creepy when the girl realizes that the robot does not want to give up the girl’s life. Results in some sort of battle and the girl discovers the button to turn off the robot is a slightly enlarged portion of the spinal column in the back of the neck. Then girl discovers her friend has been permanently replaced by a robot.
Omg. I remember this book — especially the part about the button being at the back of the friend’s neck. Thought I was losing my mind. Now to find that book! Did you guys ever figure it out?
Mine is I think a short story or short novel about a girl who sets a fish free. The fish lived in the small fountain that was set into the wall outside their house. The writing was minimalist, if I remember. This has been driving me nuts for years. I read it in the early eighties, although I don’t feel like it was necessarily new.
Could be Dear Greenpeace , or Dear Mr Blueberry, as it was released in the US. Little girl convinced she has a whale in her fountain and begins a letter-writing campaign to ask for help.
Nicole’s no. 1 sounds really like an episode in the last series of Doctor Who.
The one I am looking for is a children’s book (pretty sure it was British) that had illustrations sometimes throughout. It featured Sky Pirates and twins who were separated at birth but they both had tattoos on their back, and when they were reunited, the tattoos combined to make some kind of treasure map. One twin got raised by sky pirates and the other twin was a bit more goody-two-shoes leading to conflict about who got the treasure, maybe.
my completely unhelpful reply is that i feel like i’ve read this book as well, and would love to know what it is if you / someone ever figures it out! XD
I’m going to post mine since I’ve been thinking about it recently. Title or theme I think involved a black unicorn? And someone named Beryl? I’m thinking author somewhere along the lines of Madeline L’Engle, Ursula K, that lineage. There are two guys in it. I read it when I was wayyy too young for it so it was confusing.
The hazy movie memories post will be easy. All the answers are “Return to Oz”.
(this is me) I don’t thiiiink it is Terry Brooks but it could be. I’ll get it from the library anyways.
Tanith Lee’s The Black Unicorn?
Ooh, thanks, requested from library! It could also be Cynthia Voigt, On Fortune’s Wheel. I’m getting super deep into a rabbit hole here.
OK, I’m about 85% sure it’s The Wings of the Falcon by Voigt. Main character is Oriel, features a beryl.
Thanks for the ‘black unicorn’ red herring, brain. I must have signed them out at the same time since I was a total unicorn nut and would read anything with it on the cover/in the title.
Beryl (Birle) is a main character in Voigt’s On Fortune’s Wheel, but she is mentioned in The Wings of the Falcon, too. Both books are great!
Semi-off topic, but your icon is actually a holy-grail picture for me. I saw the fig. 1, fig. 2 image years ago, and I thought it was hilarious. I was looking for it again recently and discovered that it is completely impossible to search for.
I’ve got it saved somewhere on my work computer. Or my home computer. I agree, it’s impossible! Which is why I like it.
Not a book, but I’m glad to solve one mystery: http://funny2.com/blog/tag/fig-1/
Return to Oz IS my hazy movie memory! Heads in jars! My 2nd grade teacher showed it to us and I have been traumatized ever since.
Number 2 sounds familiar as I vaguely remember attempting to remember some of the numbers on the off chance it was a bit real and they needed a back up to remember them. Oh god I was impressionable.
I had a fake amber necklace I believed was AURYN for, you know, 11 years.
The Nevernding Story tells you to take it seriously, otherwise Fantasia DIES. Its very confusing for a child.
PS. I want that necklace.
Number 2 sounds super familiar to me. Does this sound right? It’s about teams of children (who have been intensely trained for a long time) pitted against each other in some timed competition, and the way the boy’s team wins is that he, with his head for numbers and perfectly accurate internal clock, realizes that a few of the other team’s soldiers step over the finish line (or whatever it is) a few tenths of a second late. I don’t remember much else but I remember that scene. Is this the same book?
I probably have more, but this one sprung to mind— YA book, or higher-level children’s? I read it in 6th grade & the librarian commented to me how it was advanced, so make of that what you will (level-wise). It was fantasy genre, main character a girl, set in that kind of fantasy genre time period that’s like medieval only not, because it doesn’t take place on Earth. Lots of mention of stags, like the actual deer? And tunics?
Worst description EVER
Alanna books by Tamora Pierce? She disguises herself as a boy to be a knight, and I remember a lot of woods/hunting-type scenes.
potentially that robin mckinley book about the girl whose father tries to rape her and then she disguises herself in a deerskin http://www.amazon.com/Deerskin-Robin-McKinley/dp/…
Shit it could be this, or the other ones people suggested? My memory is so vague, I don’t even know 🙁
It sounds more like the Wild Magic/Immortals quartet by Tamora Pierce, actually, what with all the stags!
Hart’s Hope? The cover is a strong image.
ooooh was it Juniper by Monica Furlong? http://www.amazon.com/Juniper-Monica-Furlong/dp/0…
The covers for that whole series were like my FAVORITE THING EVER as a child. I seem to remember Juniper weaving a magical tunic at some point?
I’m thinking Robin McKinley too, but a story from her collection The Door in the Hedge.
Also I want to re-thank the person who helped me with my lost book All About The Bullerby Children as I read it again and it’s just as delightful and I cant wait to buy it for my niece when she is a reading person.
Everyone deserves to revisit “The Bullerby Children”, you’re still welcome!
Seriously, what is it about Return to Oz that’s so haunting? I never even saw it, but I read a novelization of the movie when I was like 10, and I still remember it vividly, but I was convinced I imagined it for a while.
You don’t mean The Black Unicorn by Tanith Lee, do you? It doesn’t really fit most of the criteria, except that it has a black unicorn and Tanith Lee is sort of the same L’Engle, Le Guin era. And shelved next to them.
I didn’t see Return to Oz till I was an adult and it freaked me the fuck out. That movie is bizarre.
(DOROTHY GAAAAAALE)
Oops, misfire.
It could be. I also could have mashed two books together (thanks, brain!). I do remember it had a dude named Beryl. Following all the leads!
First of all this thread makes me happy: it exists because of the fortuitous ways books come into your life when you’re a child and you’ll pick up anything off the library shelf (the vital importance of libraries!), or some older cousin gives you all of their books, or you get something random at the Book Fair or win a raffle at the library. As an adult I almost never read something without having read all about it first and decided it’s worth my time. Stumbling into books is such a wonderful thing — but it makes them harder to remember later!
This hardly qualifies as a memory, just the vaguest of impressions that I can’t even verbalize:
A group of brothers and sisters, possibly parentless, have adventuring related to war (WWII or else fictional) and there is a climactic scene in the snow, tobogganing, a secret treasure: hidden bars of gold in the snow.
(This doesn’t make any sense and the memory is from when I was around 7, so I probably invented it.)
I love these threads too!
Could your book be this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Treasure
I’m just putting the link here, the comments are messing up embedded ones right now.
!!!! That must be it! It’s such a preposterous plot I thought for sure I made it up; turns out it’s vaguely historical fiction! Thank you for finding it!
I know this one! It’s called Snow Treasure, by Marie McSwigan, and it’s about the Nazi occupation of Norway.
Snow Treasure, by Marie Mcswigan! The kids are all friends (maybe there’s a brother and sister in the main group) and they’re smuggling Norway’s entire bullion supply down the mountain from their village, past a Nazi fort, onto fishing boats to be carried away to America by the Resistance. It is a delightful book, although I admit to being a little confused as a child about the distinction between bullion and bouillon and briefly wondering if they were smuggling soup.
SNOW TREASURE!! Whattabook.
I have one that’s been burning my brain for years. Girl’s parents are obsessed with Shakespeare, name her Portia, but I can’t recall anything else of the plot. I remember the character complaining that there are no good nicknames for Portia, which I thought as a 10 year old was pronounced Por-tia, so it didn’t make sense to me that she wasn’t known as Tia.
Oh was it about her and her brother discovering all of these decrepit old Victorian houses and fixing them up? There was a nice old couple (or brother and sister?) involved? I know that book is called Gone-Away Lake (there’s “Return to Gone-Away” too, I believe) and the main kids were Portia and Foster
Looked it up but I don’t think that was it. No brother and Shakespeare was a major part of this book.
how about the short story “Much Ado About [Censored}” from the YA sci-fi anthology 2041? The main character is named Portia, but she hasn’t been allowed to read the Shakespeare because of censorship.
Gone-Away Lake, Elizabeth Enright
http://www.amazon.com/Gone-Away-Lake-Books/dp/015…
Oooo thank you!
There’s a book I read when I was younger, at a camp for gifted 12 year olds or something, where we were vaguely studying philosophy because who is better equipped to deal with deep philosophical questions than 12 year olds?
In this book, it’s a weird utopian world and everyone is very strict, and this boy says at one stage that he wants an apple as he’s starving, and the teachers/other adults come over and scold him and say something like, “You are not starving, you are hungry. No one starves any more.” I’m sure it was an apple, and there was maybe a grandfather who didn’t like the new utopia and shared secret banned items. Obviously there’s a lot more to the story than that one paragraph but that’s the only part that’s stuck with me.
For some reason I thought it might be an Ira Levin book, but maybe my mind is playing tricks on me as I did read a lot of Ira Levin when I was 17. I don’t know if it was a book for children, maybe more young adult or adult, as I think we read 1984 in that course too.
Yeah actually maybe the course was about utopian/dystopian settings. This has been annoying me for over half my life, I don’t even know if I liked the book.
Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Traumatizing children since 1993!
Oh my god oh my god, that sounds like it’s the one! I genuinely don’t know how I hadn’t found that again. Thank you!
I…this sounds exactly like the Giver. It can’t be that easy, can it?
That sounds like it’s it! I think I exclusively read Agatha Christie novels during my formative years (why? I do’nt know) and apparently missed a lot of essential reading.
Thank you!
Agatha Christie qualifies as essential reading (for me, anyway), but it’s fascinating that you didn’t read much else! Did you picture adult life as people sitting around drawing rooms, talking about inheritances and who might have offed Uncle Barnabas?
Pretty much! They just consumed me for a long time (along with Sherlock Holmes, I read every one I could get my hands on), I just loved mystery and train travel and tea and vicars and the idea of being a super-smart old woman who figures everything out. Or a super-smart Belgian man who figures everything out, but that’s less achievable I guess.
In retrospect I find this a bit weird. I might call my mother and ask what she remembers of this time, haha. I eventually branched out (by reading everything my English teacher recommended) but still had huge gaps – have you read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde? I did not know that Jane Eyre ended the way it does and went through the book thinking, yeah, this is a much better ending, why would she just go to India?
:/
OH MY GOD ARE YOU ME? I also almost exclusively read Agatha Christie during my, I don’t even know what age because up until about 15 my life has all kind of blurred together but we’ll say late childhood/early adolescence, and I still see opportunities for murder everywhere that are alas sadly outdated now given forensic science and modern technology and all that. It was also a source of great confusion to Young Me that my elderly grandmother didn’t seem to find dead bodies wherever she went.
Agreed–I’m pretty sure that this is the Giver.
So I literally remember reading the line you quoted BUT I CAN’T REMEMBER ANYTHING ELSE ABOUT THIS BOOK EITHER! And when I try to Google variations on the quote all I get is stuff about dieting, like Ianto in that one episode of Torchwood.
THERE WAS EVEN A POST ABOUT THIS BOOK ON THIS WEBSITE. HOW DID I MISS IT. http://the-toast.net/2013/08/05/jaya-catches-up-t…
Replying now with an account and fish hat avatar.
Definitely the Giver. Jonas is the one who says it.
No, not The Giver — I just reread that recently. Yes, there’s an apple, but the point of the apple is that the kid can see color which no one else notices.
YA from the 80’s? Something about a moonflower, something about living under domes, a character with really thick glasses, and another character that was a grizzled Private Detective type, which even in this completely implausible hallucinatory memory stuck out as being not appropriate to the book.
I also remember getting this book at my school book fair, which is not necessary to identify it. I’m just saying, remember book fairs? They were cool.
Oh, my god. I found it myself. The Owlstone Crown, by X. J. Kennedy. I… I’m kind of in shock. I can’t believe it really exists. From the Google Books description:
“Ice, ice everywhere. This afternoon would be great for skating, but instead Timothy and Verity Tibbs have to work in a frozen field, digging parsnips for mean Maw and Paw Grimble to boil into bad-tasting medicine. What a life! But suddenly it changes, when Lewis O.Ladybug, private detective, brings news from another world. The twins are no longer orphans. Their grandparents still live, prisoners of Raul Owlstone, a mysterious dictator, and his army of stone owls. Now Timothy and Verity have to save their Gran and Gramp–they have to. When they follow the tiny detective over a moonlit path to Other Earth, adventures happen fast. And one day they must climb a mountain to discover a vision of pure magic, hidden under a dome of thick black glass.”
I love this book. I still have it, and it holds up remarkably well.
When I was in fifth grade a read a book about a girl who (I think) went to a canadian version of colonial Williamsburg and gets transported back in time to a french settlement in the early 19th century. It was awesome and I have never been able to find it again!
Running Out of Time? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_Out_of_Time_…
Although she isn’t transported back, she’s living in a historical replica town but doesn’t know it, so maybe not.
This was one of the mystery books I was thinking of before I posted! Thank you for knowing this.
It really stuck with me, for some reason!
M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village was pretty much a direct rip-off of this plot.
Ah, I just posted on this one downthread! Thanks!
I wouldn’t be surprised if it featured Louisburg, a big French fort that’s been restored. Mostly.
Found it! Louisburg was the key! Thank you!
http://www.amazon.com/Another-Shore-Nancy-Bond/dp…
Yay! I helped someone! Now I will have to read it too.
Wow, thank you, I’ve been wondering about that book for years! Looking at this page I think I read A String in the Harp too. Both really memorable books with kinda unmemorable titles.
if it’s acadian i think it’s THE ROOT CELLAR by janet lunn?
THUMBS UP for The Root Cellar!
There is a child (girl? two children?) hiding under a house who is bitten by a rattlesnake and has to suck the venom from her leg? They talk about the leg swelling up?
It’s not Ghosts Don’t Get Goosebumps by Elvira Woodruff, is it? I know they were crawling under a house at some point, & there’s a cane that turns out to be a snake, & someone gets bit at the end? I think?
Is it the one where the kid (boy?) ends up cutting an X over the bites to let the venom out?
If it is… I can’t remember the name. I thought it was Dear Mr. Henshaw but it must have been another book that I read at the same time because Dear Mr. Henshaw does not appear to have any snakes in it.
This is unrelated, but, ahhh, your username! Named after the Mass Effect sniper rifle, right? Legion’s sniper rifle? That is so cool!
And, on a related note, I vaguely remember the cutting an X over a snakebite thing, also, but I have no idea what it was from.
Yup – thank you!
I know that an incident with cutting an X over the rattlesnake bite occurred in “They Loved to Laugh” by Kathryn Worth.
This happens in the first Trixie Belden book, but it’s a copperhead snake, and Trixie’s little brother who gets bitten, and I don’t think anyone is hiding under the house, so it’s probably not the same.
Pretty sure that’s The TV Kid by Betsy Byars. Main character Lennie ends up under a house (searching for a dog maybe) and gets bitten by a rattler.
OMYGOD, YES! I am a zillion years late to this, but it was The TV Kid!
YES! I don’t remember the name, but the kid sneaks into people’s vacation houses when they’re not there, and he was hiding because the people came back or something. His mom ran a motel. I remember the book talking about her flashing the “vacancy” sign when a car drove by.
I read this in 7th grade, so 1992 or 1992, and it felt dated then. It’s our world, but post-technology – for some reason it was decided that electricity (I think?) is a bad idea – because war, probably – so it might be illegal to use it. There’s a mandatory competition that teens take part in to decide status. The kids are divided into three teams, and two of the teams are more advantaged because the kids come from richer families. The hero comes from a poor family and so is on the weakest team, but he comes up with a new strategy to beat the other teams. He ends up becoming friends with the leader of one of the losing team, and they leave their community (or are expelled?) for some reason, and walk along a highway (at which point I realized that it’s our world in the future). Anyone? I don’t even remember liking this book much, but I’m curious what it is.
I think I found it (after spending way too long looking): anyone remember The Prince in Waiting?
OKAY I can’t resist, I have two:
1) A children’s book, read in the mid-90s, about squirrels planning to take over the world? As I remember it, it was entirely from the point of view of squirrels and surprisingly dark?
2) A YA book from the 70s or 80s titled WILL THE REAL (I forget the name) STAND UP. About a teenage girl who found out she was adopted or something? This one should be easy but my forgetting the name makes it hard to search for, as that’s obviously a pretty popular title formulation.
There a re a ton of books titled “Will the Real ___ Please Stand Up?”: Gertrude Hollings, Monday, Rennie Lake, Jeannie Murphy, Tommy Wilson were all published in the ’70s or 80s
Are you sure that wasn’t a subtitle thing on one of the covers for the face on the milk carton? I ask because I am PRETTY SURE I remember this, but that series is the only thing that comes to mind…
Totally sure. This is something else. I remember “The Face on the Milk Carton” crystal clearly, along with its stellar film adaptation: http://youtu.be/hzqtwIQYnzM
Kellie Martin’s finest work.
Your second one is driving me crazy. I feel like I know it but I can’t find it either. I have about 7 tabs open right now of “Will the Real…” book titles and none sound right!
Welcome to the last seventeen years of my life. I vaguely remember a cover with a girl with curly brown hair standing in her bedroom? And there are paintings or newspaper clippings or something hanging on the walls? I’m sure this is very helpful.
Is the first one the one where there is kind of a territorial war between red squirrels and grey squirrels? I don’t remember the title, but it had a very bleak ending and the author thanked Richard Adams for inspiration, and I just remember thinking, “guy, this is not Watership Down. You had the grey squirrels invade and kill all the red squirrels. This book is actually kind of racist”.
Hmmmmmm, it’s possible! I guess I remembered it as squirrels vs. humans but I don’t know for sure that there wasn’t squirrel-on-squirrel crime occurring. What I mainly remember is the bleakness, so this is a good lead.
I finally found the one I was talking about (after googling about 30 different versions of “squirrel war”): The Dorset Squirrels by Michael Tod. There doesn’t seem to be any humans though, so it’s probably not the one you were thinking of. But if you’re interested in some squirrel dystopia, it doesn’t get much squirrellier than this. And it’s a trilogy, because of course.
Verrrry interesting. I don’t think this was it, but it’s good to know there’s so much squirrel warfare fiction out there.
It could be “A Royal Pain,” by Ellen Conford, which had the subtitle “Will the real Princess Florinda XIV please stand up?” on the cover when I read it. I couldn’t find the book for years because I misremembered the title, and you might have too. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/514108.A_Roya…
Oooh, good guess but I don’t think this is it. It was very contemporary and very realistic, also I feel like it was targeted to an older age group, mid- to late-teens. I FEEL LIKE WE’RE SO CLOSE.
For 2, how about WILL THE REAL BECKA MORGAN PLEASE STAND UP? It’s from a series called “Three of a Kind” and was published in 1994. Summary: Becka bends over backwards to become the most popular girl in school, making life miserable for herself and her new adoptive sisters.
There’s also MOLLY BY ANY OTHER NAME, which doesn’t fit your formula at all but has kind of the same sensibility.
I remember the squirrels! I haven’t thought of that book in ages, and cannot for the life of me think of the name, but I feel like the cover was very green – possibly looking down from a tree? For some reason the details I’m thinking of are a squirrel/chipmunk getting injured and brought inside in a cage by some kids to take care of while it heals, and the other squirrels/chipmunks think it’s an attack, so they rise up and start to take over the neighborhood, and then the city…
YES YES YES. THIS IS THE BOOK I AM THINKING OF. VERY GREEN COVER. YES.
SUCCESS! Forest, by Janet Taylor Lisle: http://www.amazon.com/Forest-Janet-Taylor-Lisle/d…
Amber Padgett, the squirrels Woodbine and Barker, Upper Forest and Lower Forest… it’s apparently available on Kindle, but I’m hopefully sharing the link that has the old cover I remember!
YES! This is it. OH MY GOD, thank you!!!! I had assumed I’d just dreamed this book up for so long.
Bless you. I’ve been up for HOURS digging through boxes for this book because I couldn’t remember the title! THANK YOU!
Ooh, I love this thread and I’m sad that I don’t know any of the books summarized thus far.
The one I’m trying to remember is a young adult novel about a girl whose father is a famous painter, mother gave up career to have family. Girl attempts suicide, is found by her sister. Girl attempts to paint, tries to draw a portrait of the housekeeper’s daughter. It’s sort of terrible, but some other work by her shows promise. Girl also has a pseudo relationship with a student (?) of her father’s. Father makes some comment at the end about a retrospective being done in his honor, saying that they only give retrospectives to people whose best work is behind them. There is the sense that he’s passing the torch to his daughter.
Perhaps this might be In Summer Light by Zibby Oneal?
Oh my goodness, that’s it! Thank you! I think this book was like a gateway drug to all the Ann Beattie short stories I read in my 20s.
I must have mashed it up with another Zibby Oneal book, Language of Goldfish, for the suicide part.
This one has been driving me crazy for YEARS: I’m fairly certain that it was a book of scary stories, and there was one story that involved bombs falling on children, and the few seconds of “tick tick tick” before the bomb explodes. And that is my entire memory of the book. No wonder I can’t remember the title.
This was a book of children’s bedtime stories, which my brothers and I read in the very early ’90s. I THINK the cover was dark blue, with kids on a magic carpet, possibly with a man, and the moon in the background. Stories included: A girl whose new shoes were too tight, a king who ate so many jelly doughnuts that he destroyed his town, a hippo who was laughed out of the ballet so she made her own ballet program. Each story was between a paragraph and a few pages. Pretty realistic illustrations. Thank you!!!
AHhhh I just remembered a book I’ve been wanting to hunt down for the longest time! There’s a girl, and she’s a painter I think, and she starts losing her eyesight? And she might form a friendship with another girl who’s already blind? The most helpful thing I can remember is that she paints a still life of lemons in a blue bowl and there’s a very vivid description of the colours and shapes used.
That totally sounds like a Lurlene Mcdaniel book.
Is it Elizabeth Benning’s The Dying of the Light? I don’t remember a friendship with another blind girl, but one of the main characters is definitely an artist who loses her sight after an accident, and I’m pretty sure that I remember the lemon thing.
omg YES I think you’re right! I obviously made up some details but that sounds right! Thank you!!
Light a Single Candle, Beverly Butler? http://www.amazon.com/Light-Single-Candle-Beverly…
Artist girl with degenerative eye condition undergoes surgery and looses eyesight. Goes to a school for the blind, hates it, returns home to get a seeing eye dog, go back to public highschool, find romance.
I don’t remember the still life of lemons.
Is number 3 not The Castle in the Attic? I just googled it and can find no mention of his mom in the summary, but I am so positive that is what it is for some reason…
I’ve never heard of this, but now I’m going to spend the rest of the day on the Wiki page about time travel novels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Time_travel…
oh nooooooooooooo there goes my day
Ooooooo!
I really don’t think so. There was no field trip and the mom doesn’t go with him.
I had those books, they were excellent!
I feel like the sequel to Castle in the Attic had something about his mom? But I don’t remember a field trip.
Guys, come on, put your thinking caps on, I really need to solve #3. It’s starting to mess up my day/life.
This sound an awful lot like the kind of subject (and sense of humor) you’d get from a Diana Wynne Jones book. And she wrote SO MANY: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Wynne_Jones_bi…
Diana Wynne Jones (RIP) was a genius, and for the longest time, my mystery book was “Dogsbody,” but then I found it and couldn’t believe it was a Diana Wynne Jones all along. “Witch Week” is my favourite favourite. I think it’s actually a really good book about being in school, despite also being in a dystopian witch-persecuting alternate world.
WITCH WEEK. Changed my life. I had never read something so adult (the burnings! the horrible things institutions do to kids/kids do to each other!) and yet so absolutely meant for young people to read. DWJ (RIP indeed) was my next logical step after Ellen Raskin in terms of thematically mature lit for kids.
‘It hurts to be burned.”
“Dogsbody” is my favorite! My copy is falling to shreds because I read it whenever I want to cry about something other than the thing I actually want to cry about.
“Witch Week” was my intro into the world of Diana Wynne Jones and I will always, always love it.
Witch Week was my mystery book back in elementary school / junior high, and even before the recent paranormal craze, it was very hard to find a book when all you (think you) know about it is witches and shoes. I think at some point I went through the card catalog of all books that had the keyword “witch.”
Completely agree–the “I only want the things from the brochure!” is a running joke, I could swear, in The Dark Lord of Derkholm.
It’s not the one that involves a boy reincarnated Arthur and an ex-FBI agent reincarnated Galahad and Saladin and Stonehenge and baddies committing suicide with cyanide tablets is it? Because THAT one is The Forever King. I read it when I was 13 and it sent me down a Arthurian legend rabbit hole to my general benefit.
NOPE.
Nicole if it involved a cat instead of a mom I think either Witch-Cat or Time Cat- I have vague memories of both (makes me wonder if there was a designation of magic historical cats in teh card catalogue). In each I think the cats takes the kids through time. In Witch-Cat the main character is a girl, and her cat reveals her witch powers, and I *think* the mom is in on it and I think she goes and sees some various time periods? (i need to re-read this one- it only barely qualifies as a memory and not a forgotten book).
In Time Cat main character is a boy and he does hit up some roman/celt stuff.
No cat.
I think I saw a movie version of this plotline (vaguely) and found out it was a Terry Pratchett book?
Nicole in #3 were the people sent back in time through a book and the Arthurian times are fictional and they were created by the author and they try to locate the author of the book? I distinctly remember the story in the movie involving a clueless mum.
I CAN’T REMEMBER THE NAME OF THIS EITHER
Maybe!
Nope!
I don’t know the answers to any of these 🙁 Nicole’s #1 reminds me of a scene in Housekeeping. The two sisters have a dictionary, and their dead mom? or was it their grandpa? pressed flowers in it, with the spots in the dictionary matching the first letter of the flowers. The dreamy sister liked it, but the more practical sister got annoyed and shook all of the flowers out of the book so that she could use the dictionary to do homework. It makes me sad when I can identify more with the practical sister than the dreamy one, but such is adult life I guess.
I loved Housekeeping.
Oh yeah! They’re cooking or something, and they need too look something up in the dictionary, and it’s full of flowers. Roses under “R”, pansies under “P”. They’re both like “fucking seriously, can this house get any more twee?” and then one of them dumps out all the flowers and crushes them by rubbing her hands together, and the other one is like “hey!”
This is a really good idea that makes me wish all my vague book memories weren’t SO vague. I have had one book gnawing at me for years even though pretty much all I’ve got is, “There was a lot of talk about plaid and house guests. I think they were near the ocean?” I should probably try to let that one go.
Wait, what was the book about a moving castle and a girl worked there undercover to outwit the “evil magician” who turned out to be very nice instead? Also the book was somehow based on a John Donne poem–the “go and catch a falling star / get with child a mandrake root” one (“song”). It has been driving me nuts for years that I can’t remember the name of this book.
is that not Howl’s Moving Castle?
Howl’s Moving Castle? So good. (And heh, see my previous comment re: the ubiquity of Diana Wynne Jones. I think she is responsible for like 30% of all vivid-yet-hazily recalled YA.)
William Sleator is responsible for another 20%, and he and Monica Hughes together are responsible for 90% of all vivid-yet-hazily remembered middle grade/YA science fiction. All three of them were just so prolific!
Are you sure it’s not Howl’s Moving Castle?
Yeah, it’s definitely Howl’s Moving Castle.
Howl’s Moving Castle! Gorgeous Miyazaki anime. Haven’t read Diana Wynne Jones’ original book though. Wiki says Donne reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl%27s_Moving_Cast…
Mine was a series of books about a girl who had several brothers and sisters. In one, she falls in with a popular crowd and is at first very flattered, but then alarmed by the antics of the other girls (who are older than her). In the second, they move to an island and at some point have to create a runway for an emergency airplane (when there’s a power outage?) and they get all the cars on the island to line up with their headlights to create the runway. She has an intense relationship with a boy on the island who had a relative pass away earlier when an emergency airplane couldn’t get to the island.
Could these be “Ten Kids No Pets” and “Eleven Kids One Summer” by Ann M. Martin? I read them so long ago, I don’t remember details about popular crowds or emergency airplanes, but there certainly are a lot of brothers and sisters, and the second book does take place on an island.
The intense relationship with a boy who had a relative pass away sounds like L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light — but none of the rest of it does! 🙂
This last sentence made me think of the Austin books by Madeline L’Engle — Vicky Austin has an intense relationship with the boy whose father died in the ocean saving the life of her semi-boyfriend, who was trying to commit suicide. But the rest doesn’t seem right…
I remember reading a book with this emergency airplane part! Unfortunately, I have the worst memory ever and couldn’t tell you what it was. But it does exist!
It mayyyy have been part of a series of short kid-horror (….) stories? One of them was about a kid at a cider farm who gets stuck in/almost stuck in the apple crusher.
And in my mind I’m connecting it to a story about a man/stepfather figure whose wives keep “disappearing” but really he’s killing them and hiding them behind individual doors in a hidden hallway which the kid eventually finds.
The first one sounds like an r l stine Goosebumps book.
OH MY GOD THANK YOU FOR THIS OPPORTUNITY. Okay, all of these were published in the seventies or eighties, I think.
1) From early childhood: a rather beautiful series of illustrated books about a boy and a girl (I think their names were similar to Hansel and Gretel and that hers was Gretchen) and their adventures in a magic forest. I particularly remember something about them going into underground tunnels with moles or other such woodland creatures, and some gorgeous illustrations there.
2) Also for younger kids: an illustrated book about some place where they held a regatta. I don’t know whether the characters were human or animal or blob. Something about it has always stuck with me, but in the most infuriatingly vague way. Probably it’s just the fact that ‘regatta’ was a new word for me.
3) This one was pretty cool: a novel about a boy and a girl from rival families that practised magic. They might have been nobility, and I’m pretty sure they were Italian. I don’t remember if it was a romance or a friendship, but anyway, their families weren’t thrilled about them hanging out, and there was some kind of precarious event on a bridge, and then they got magicked into a tiny box and had some difficulties getting out for a while.
4) Something about a boy and a girl in possibly New England who hung out with a quirky old witch who might’ve been called Trudy. I think there were at least two books about them. Unfortunately my most vivid recollections here are of things like discovering US spelling.
#3 is the Magicians of Caprona, I think!
OMG THANK YOU!!
Earthstar Magic?
Wow, I just looked it up and I have no memory whatsoever of the earthstar stuff. But regardless, I’m gonna go with a yes. Thank you!
I think #3 might be Do It Yourself Magic by Ruth Chew.
When I was trying to think of books involving plaid and the beach for the person who asked above, I remembered this book about some family that lives right on the beach, a mother and a bunch of kids, and they’re very poor but it’s still sort of idyllic, and then the mother remarries, I think, and they have to move away, which really upsets the narrator, who’s one of the girls, I think?
That rings a faint bell. Did she climb a lot of trees? Was the mother a scientist maybe?
I was thinking the mother was a writer, but it could be.
That’s not Half Magic, is it? By Edward Eagar?
Haha, that seems to be the go-to guess! No, it wasn’t fantasy as far as I remember, and I’m pretty sure it was the US beach.
An old house, covered in ivy(?) with a large garden, young protagonist befriends a shadow (not a ghost, i think, but specifically a shadow). The shadow hangs out outside because it can’t enter the house? At some point the kid brings cake outside for the shadow to “eat”? Pretty sure this book is out of print.
Not sure if this fits, but Ivy Cottage by E. J. Taylor was about a retired nanny who looks after a ‘live’ ragdoll. This one is about them moving to the cottage, which is covered in ivy, so they can’t find it at night when they first get there…
Not sure about your shadow though. I guess it was a series, so maybe there’s one about a shadow later?
IVY COTTAGE WAS AMAZING. As were it’s illustrations.
This does not match ANY of the specific beats of your request, but I just want to mention Mrs. Gaddy and the Ghost, just in case, because it was a book I forgot for a long time and then found recently.
Was this a picture book? and was it The Dark by Robert Munsch?
A picture book from early childhood, which in my case was early ’60s. I know that was so very long ago, so maybe someone came across this book at Grandma’s house? Haha, groan. It was about a family of pigs who were adventurers or something and in this book, they went spelunking. this was the first time I heard the word “spelunking” and also I think this book is the reason I still find anthropomorphic pigs so funny, to the dismay of everyone in my family. I searched for this book when my son was little, to no avail. At this point, I would just like to know if this book is real or if it was a baby aspirin induced hallucination.
The Mellops Go Spelunking, maybe? It had weird light blue and black and white illustrations, and had a lot of creepy cave pictures? http://www.amazon.com/The-Mellops-Spelunking-Tomi…
OMG! Yes!! This is it! Why couldn’t I find this before? (Maybe because I was looking for it in the early 90s and the Internets were not hooked up all the way yet?) This is exactly it, and now it’s triggering memories of those other Mellops books too. Tomi Ungerer. Wow. Thank you!!!
A possible trilogy — at least two books.
Probably came out around 2003? This was some weird dystopian-future thing, but it did not take place on earth. There was a boy and a girl that were on a quest — to some sort of central mountain or tower — and the boy, at least, had something with special powers, like a flute or bow. Agh, this sounds like every YA book ever. They were from a segmented society, and they were from some lower caste/class.
The covers were very cool, stylized illustration, the first one was all in red tones, and depicted the central mountain/tower. I remember the vibe was kind of like The Giver, and whenever I search for these books, I get that series called like Ember or something, but that is not this. These seemed a lot more sinister, and they were gorgeous, thick hardcover books when I read them. For reference, they belonged to a kid I babysat for who was also into Eragon.
I feel like maybe they’d be compared to the Hunger Games now, for whatever reason.
I have not been able to place these books for at least 5 years.
I am betting that’s the Wind on Fire trilogy— this is the original cover of the first book and it haunted me for ages, enough to keep me rereading the book even though I’ve never been sure if I liked it.
The boy’s name is Bowman. I can’t remember anymore if he actually had a bow! He did have superpowers though.
Yes!! I read these while babysitting and the kids were sleeping, and my memories were so wacky of them. Thank you!
I haven’t read the series but this sounds a lot like the Seventh Tower series (and the first book’s cover is red: the fall: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_%28Garth_Ni…
buuuut who knows.
I was going to say the 7th Tower too.
The Wind on Fire answer was the right one, but I totally read Seventh Tower, too.
The Wind Singer? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Singer (That’s the first book in the Wind on Fire trilogy.) I’ve only read the first one but I loved it and it sounded kind of like what you’re describing!
OH MY WORD THIS IS IT. Thank you!
YES I LOVED THIS SERIES SO VERY MUCH
There was a family that had like ten kids, and the parents named them alphabetically, so the oldest was an A name, then a B name, and so on. At the end there was a surprise pregnancy, and they decided to skip the rest of the alphabet and give the baby a Z name.
fuuuu I REMEMBER THIS BOOK! I can’t wait to find it out.
I think you’re thinking of Ann M Martin, “Ten Kids, No Pets”?
Yay, THANKS you guys! This thing really works.
Ten Kids, No Pets by Ann M Martin (she of Babysitters Club fame!)
There’s a sequel too! They go to Fire Island for the summer and each kid gets a chapter. One of the kids gets lyme disease and that’s how I learned about the characteristic bull’s eye rash that comes with lyme. Also, the girls painted sea shells and sold them. I tried it and no one bought them. 🙁
I wondered if these were the books Kaitlyn was asking about above.
Ok, I’ve got VERY little info about this book, but I can’t stop wondering what it was. It was a chapter book I read in the late 80s/early 90s. A bunch of kids, some of whom are siblings, meet and have adventures around a large city (maybe New York?). Nothing magical. One of the older brothers has red hair. I believe it was made into a tv movie or miniseries around the same time, maybe on a pay channel or cable?
Could this be “Remember Me To Harold Square” by Paula Danziger?
Could it be The Melendy series by Elizabeth Enright? the first book in the Series is called The Saturdays, where the siblings take turns having adventures in NYC.This book is much older than the ones discussed so far–it takes place during WW2.
1. There was this book I read a couple of times in fifth or sixth grade that I’d love to find again about orphans during the French revolution or its aftermath. Some of them were siblings, but as a group they just randomly banded together. I think it was set in the winter and some of the kids got sick or possibly froze their toes off.
2. While I’m here: creepy YA with two stepbrothers who have jointly inherited the genius of some composer. Maybe Liszt? One brother can compose like him and one can play the piano like him. And there are lots of severed hands. Some belong to dolls. some do not.
Is 2 William Sleator’s “Fingers”?
Yes! The description on Amazon makes it sound even creepier than I remembered.
#1: The Book Thief?
No, and I realize I cleverly wrote “French Revolution” instead of “Russian Revolution” which was what I meant.
#1-milkweed
There is a boy who is truly excellent at that Mayan/Aztec ball game that vaguely resembles basketball: it has two stone “hoops” at either end and you have to get a tiny rubber ball into the hoops while the other team basically tries to take you DOWN, rugby-style. Anyway, this boy, he is awesome at this game and somehow there’s a catastrophe and he has to go challenge the gods to a game of ball?
It is a children’s book, and it had amazing illustrations. They were photographs of paper-cuts, the kind that are layered on top of one another to create perspective, and it was largely in blacks and greens and reds and oranges, and there is one scene where the boy is playing ball against the gods in a lightning storm and it’s pretty kickass.
NEVER MIND I found it! Rain Player, by David Wisniewski, and look at these illustrations are they not amazing?
Those are terrific. We should have a Toast post on illustrators.
I am pretty certain that this is the book Mr. Pietra has been trying to explain to me for a while now. OMG COMPLETELY AMAZING.
Guys, here are some search sources. http://www.ebscohost.com/novelist
Novelist has helped me more than once! http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/lost/novels.htm…
See if your library subscribes to it. Chicago Public Library does.
This is my favorite recurring thread. More of these, please, Nicole!
Here are mine:
1) Middle grade, pretty old book but I read it in the 90s. The main character is a boy and the title is his name. He is really into “dowsing” for water, or maybe oil. He is also into… inventing things? And maybe truffle hunting pigs. At some point these pursuits actually come to fruition and he discovers oil under the plot of land he’s been exploring in his neighborhood. I think.
2) Middle grade, probably from the 80s or 90s. A group of kids are doing some sort of protest march, walking along highways (maybe to DC?). I just remember the very specific images of them walking along highways. They are carrying a flag with them.
3) Middle grade, probably 80s or 90s. A girl lives in a historic reenactment place, but Truman Show style, so she really thinks she lives in these colonial times. She escapes or gets let out near the beginning of the book and has to deal with suddenly being in a modern city.
#3 is Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix, I’m pretty sure! That book blew my mind as a kid.
Yes! Someone just posted it in response to a different query above, too. Thanks!! That book, and Three Lives to Live ( <a href=”http://(http://www.amazon.com/Three-Lives-Live-Anne-Lindbergh/dp/product-description/0671867326,” target=”_blank”>(http://www.amazon.com/Three-Lives-Live-Anne-Lindbergh/dp/product-description/0671867326, which I also couldn’t remember but figured out by googling), were the two totally weird time travel books that have vaguely stuck with me for a long time.
YES and then Shamalayan totally ripped it off in The Village and I CALLED THAT FUCKING TWIST because of YA novels. Bam!
AH — #1 is Henry Reed, Inc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Reed_(fictiona…
#2 is The Fragile Flag by Jane Langton of The Diamond in the Window fame.
YES IT IS! Thank you so much!
This is a picture book that I loved when I was little (so…early-mid ’90s? I’m not sure when it was published, though), but now both my mom and I are at a complete loss for the title.
It’s about a little girl (I can’t remember her name, but I think it may be in the title) who’s visiting her grandmother’s house, which is pink and set on a hill. There are plum trees all around and she and her grandmother pick them and make jam. That night, toys come out of the chest in the little girl’s room and end up flying into the sky and bringing her back a blanket full of stars, but then it starts raining and the little girl thinks the sky is crying and the moon is lonely, so they throw the stars back into the sky. At the end it’s implied that the grandmother knew all about the magical toys, too, and maybe did the same thing when she was young?
It’s a lovely book, beautifully illustrated, and I read it so many times that it’s driving me crazy to not remember the title.
It’s “Nora’s Stars”: http://www.amazon.com/Noras-Stars-Satomi-Ichikawa…
I remember this from when I was a volunteer in my son’s elementary school library early’ 90s – it was popular with the little girls.
I LOVED this book. I have always wanted a garden like the grandmother’s.
YES. Thank you!! Though that title didn’t sound quite right, and from poking around Amazon it looks like it had its title changed at some point — the copy I owned was actually called Where The Stars Belong.
(I am going to go call my mother and tell her this RIGHT NOW, because it has been bugging both of us for months.)
WAIT I have one more. This was a middle grade book from those 90s monthly books-by-mail programs. I read SO many of those books and I don’t remember any of the titles.
The one I’m thinking of involved a girl and her little brother crashing their car near a mountain in a blizzard. Maybe their parents crashed, and were incapacitated. The girl and her brother needed to go for help, so they used her rock climbing skills and random materials they had in the car to climb up the mountain. My strongest memories, although they may be fabricated/enhanced with time, are of her fashioning makeshift carabiners and hammering stakes into the mountain to hold the next clip, etc.
I read this!! Its called “Climb or Die: A Test of Survival” by Edward Myers
YES! You guys are amazing.
Now that I hear the title I totally remember it, too. I’m pretty sure this is the origin of my “better keep all sorts of survival gear in your car at all times JUST IN CASE” philosophy.
How’s this for vague? I took this out of the library when I was 8 or 9 (so early 90s), not sure how old it was at the time. It was in the present tense (I’d never read anything in present tense before that I recall — maybe it was also second person? Not sure). For some reason the hero is assigned a number of impossible seeming tasks to do. One of them, I *think*, was that there were some churches (like, buildings) running around that had to be settled down so he got them all to crash into each other and form one mega-church. Or…something like that. I remember being baffled by it, so perhaps there were not actually mobile churches and I severely misinterpreted something. (…seems likely.)
Ooh I have one! I’m pretty sure it’s really obscure but – there was a young girl (who may have been an orphan and whose name may have started with a D) who wanted a family, somehow made a wish and then became a part of one, not through adoption just magical acceptance into this existing family. Part of the way through the book the wish begins to fade or something goes wrong and she finds herself becoming a stranger to the family again, they sometimes can’t remember who she is or why she’s there. I think I was 11 when I read it and it still strikes me as sad although it probably had a happy ending.
That sounds like a horrific combo of Harry Potter and Flowers for Algernon. THE FEELS.
Oh I remember this one!!! She wasn’t an orphan, but her real mother (her name was Rae, I think?) was pretty terrible and neglectful. There’s a scene at the end where she’s with her actual aunt and grandmother, too. Can’t remember the title for the life of me, though.
Awake and Dreaming, by Kit Pearson.
omg kit pearson. i read so many of her books, the sky is falling / guests of war series. there’s somewhere in there that talks about women wearing ‘kotex belts’ and i didn’t even know what periods were yet and it seemed like the STRANGEST thing.
This book took place in olden-times (1800s? Early 1900s?). Three young adults in this small town somehow got wishes (bought them, maybe, at a fair?), and of course they all backfired. One guy wished for water, because his father’s farm was suffering from a drought. He had the ability to dowse for water (tibia’s post up-thread reminded me of this one), and hadn’t been able to find any water, but after he made the wish, water began spouting up from the ground, causing a flood. A young woman had a crush on a travelling salesman, and she wished that he would never leave, which turned him into a tree. I don’t remember the third, or how it ended. Anyone?
Never mind, google found it for me quickly: The Wish Giver.
Hahah, god that book was fucked up. For years after reading that I refused to wish for anything without ostentatious disclaimers just in case it came true.
yes!!! this book was SO dark and I immediately thought of it the first time I ever watched Stephen King’s Needful Things.
Our teacher either read this to us, or we listened to it on tape, around 1997. It was a story meant to teach you about math, because it was about some kids (four of them?) who got sent to this mysterious land and they had to solve various problems to survive and try to escape. I remember something about a cave, and them becoming really thirsty – and something about Roman numerals? Anyway, I loved it so much that I plugged my ears through half of it so I could have the pleasure of reading it again later. And then I forgot what it was and never saw it again. Bah.
I’m afraid I don’t know the book but that is adorable! (The plugging your ears so you could read it later part.)
I figured it out! It’s by Russian author Vladimir Levshin and it’s part of a trilogy, called “The Master of the Absent-Minded Sciences”. The one I’ve read is the third book and I think it’s the one you’re thinking of; it’s called “The New Tales of the Absent-Minded Master” where they travel to a far-off land in pursuit of a stolen stamp but I can’t find any mention of it having been translated into English. So, I don’t know how you could find it now, sorry!
Hm, it could be! – of the books in the series, Three Days in Karlikania seems the most similar (three kids on an adventure in a mysterious land), although the one we read seemed more dire, and the kids had to solve problems to get closer to their escape. I’ll look into it though, thanks so much!!
I specifically remember a book in which a character, towards the beginning, finds a four-leaf clover, digs it up, plants it in a thimble or other tiny thing, and carries it with her. Then we find out toward the end that only living four-leaf clovers grant good luck, and that’s the reason certain good things had happened for her. I THINK there was Arthurian legend/time travel involved.
There was a book i read in middle school… I think it was a trilogy? There were ravens possibly and wolves and a tower and I think there was some sort of mystical world they could go to in their minds? And a queen there was definitely a queen. And possibly snow? The title was something like the wolf queen or raven queen or wolf wall or something omg this is so vague, I’m sorry.
I’m not 100% sure about the mind-world but maybe Tanith Lee’s Claidi Journals series? The first one was called Wolf Tower, and is the only one I really remember, but I think one of them is called Wolf Queen.
Yesssss that’s what it is thank you!!
Was it the Claidi series by Tanith Lee? I read them a long time ago and don’t remember all the details, but there was one called Wolf Tower and one called Wolf Queen, for sure.
http://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Tower-The-Claidi-Journ…
YES!! that’s totally what it was! Thank you!
Okay I read this either in fourth or fifth grade so it was six or seven years ago that but that doesn’t mean much of anything because the children’s section of that library was huge. It’s middle grade science fiction. Actually maybe not since I remember some things shelved in there that I read way too young. A boy finds out he and some classmates (people in the same town? went to the same church?) and their families are actually refugee aliens from another planet. One boy goes missing and they find out later he went through a terrifying transformation into his alien form. This quote ties in, something about searching for signals from their home planet “His satellite dish points the wrong way” they may not be refugees could possibly be waiting to take over, but then I could be mixing up books. Also it’s a possibility I dreamed it’s existence.
Maybe The Dark Side of Nowhere by Neal Shusterman?
Yes! That’s it! Thank you so much that’s been bugging me for ages I was beginning to think I imagined the whole thing I’m so glad this was actually a thing.
Considering how wild that book was, I can’t blame you for thinking you imagined it.
this sounds CRAZY
in a good way! i should add
It so was but it made a huge impression on nine year old me.
This one has been bugging me for years. Slim paperback, YA or younger. Cover has a window with a mountain and maybe a moon? Title is ___________ Peak, I think, and the first word is a weird name? Main character is entranced by this fucking mountain, which is…possessed? Haunted? Makes a weird noise at night. Goes up the mountain for a thing, I think. I am not being helpful here at all. Please help.
Ohmigod I loved this book He’s staying with his aunt and uncle and all the townsfolk are scared of the beast on the mountain? It started with an M. Megaramum? Something very close to that.
I DIDN’T DREAM THIS BOOK UP THANK GOD
Yes! That sounds exactly right. Something weird like that!
Think I found it! Is it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knee-Knock_Rise
OH MY GOD YOU ARE A SAINT
Edit: here’s the copy I read!
Where did I get “peak” from?
That was the exact same one I had! I dunno it sounded right to me. It’s funny when I saw your post I could picture the cover but not the title.
Here is one my mom has been looking for years, which she read sometime in the 1950s/60s:
Set in 1930s China during tumult involving warlords and bandits. A Chinese scholar’s son is sent to live with peasants because his father thinks he’ll be safer there; unfortunately, the village is soon raided. The bandit chief’s horse rears and a fancy ancient teapot falls from his saddlebag; the boy recognizes its age and value and catches it. This amuses the bandit, and the boy is taken with them to their camp, where he meets an American missionary’s son, also captured, and another scholar. They attempt to teach the missionary child Chinese, but he has difficulty with tones and keeps using the word for “mushroom.”
I think I checked my mystery book out of the YA section of the library prior to 1995. The main character is a young woman (in her twenties? I want to say she is 25) who has car trouble one day, and when she wanders off the side of the road she steps through a portal to another world. She ends up on some sort of desert planet (?) and befriends a set of child twins and an adult male. She gradually learns their language and starts to feel at home in the desert, but at the end of the book she magically gets returned to her dumb broken-down car. Please help! I feel like I hallucinated this book.
That almost sounds like a Madeline L’Engle (maybe Many Waters) but I think that’s just because of the twins and the desert planet.
Oooh, they do sound similar. But I own a copy of Many Waters, and I vividly remember checking this book out of the library once and never seeing it again.
Colors in the Dreamweaver’s Loom, by Beth Hilgartner? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_in_the_Dreamw…
Oh my gosh that is it!! Thank you! It’s so interesting how memories warp over time.
So, the age isn’t correct on this, but is it Colors In the Dreamweaver’s Loom by Beth Hilgartner? I loved that book and it was once a ‘mystery’ book of my own. That and the (inferior) sequel, Feast of the Trickster, were both books that I LOVED and then could never find again. Most likely because they only had the one print run.
I have got to get a hold of the sequel now! Thanks!
I remember not liking the sequel as much, but I still stalk Amazon in the hopes of seeing cheap copies go up for sale used. Those books were SO good.
Thank you for this thread! My book that I wish I could remember is about two girls named Danielle whose parents were high school sweethearts but then lost touch. They planned to name their future daughter Danielle and they both did, even though they had them with different people, and the girls were nicknamed Dani and Nell. The parents got back together and Nell (who had a movie star mom) moved in with Dani’s family for the summer and…I remember lots of other details, like they are from California and Florida (which both have oranges) and Dani doesn’t want to wear zinc on her nose until the cute lifeguard tells her to…I could go on but hopefully someone will recognize this one.
I remember that, and using the resources Lu2 posted earlier in the comments I uncovered…One Sister Too Many! I don’t know how to do anything fancy like post images or comments, but it’s by Carol Perry.
Thank you, that is it! Not the best book but I really needed to know what it was 🙂
There was a book I read in elementary school, a picture book, in which some kid needs to make… I think it was an apple pie? Some sort of baked good? And to gather all the ingredients, said kid needed to travel the world to find where they came from? I just remember that the sugar or cinnamon came from Sri Lanka, which was highly impressive to me when I was 9 or so.
Any ideas?
I used to love that book! It was called “How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World,” by Marjorie Priceman.
Fantastic!! Thank you! I’ve been wondering about that one for years. 😀
This can’t get any vaguer: YA title, I bet I checked it out between 1989 and 1993 from the library. hardcover, maybe 250-300 pages, royal/cobalt blue cover with something on it. A fantasy about a girl, I think she might be the heir to the kingdom, and she is spirited away to be raised/sheltered with rebels while until she can rise up and overthrow the evil advisors/uncle/whatever who have taken her country. I remember her escaping from the castle/kingdom through a tunnel, or possibly the kingdom was walled and she escaped under the wall. I seem to remember her emerging from the escape route to a firelit rebel camp. I’ve been looking for this book FOREVER.
Are there dragons involved? This sounds a bit like the beginning of The Book of Earth by Marjorie Kellogg.
No dragons, and the cover looked different. But that looks good and is now on my to-read list!
Ronia the Robber’s Daughter by Lindgren from 1985? That has the young-girl-heir-runs-away, stone-and-secret-passageways elements…
The Blue Sword, maybe? I found this by searching for every possible color permutation + sword because I also vaguely remembered reading something called that, and the timing/description seems right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Sword
Might it be The Seer and the Sword?
A book for kids maybe 4th-7th grade or so about a girl who lived in this old house and there was some sort of secret passageway that took her into another world. And maybe in that other world she was either bigger or smaller than everyone else? And there was magic in the other world? And maybe a castle with sconces? I’m less certain on everything except the fact that there was some passage/portal to the other world.
I am really tempted to say “Alice in Wonderland” which it’s probably not but it sounds so similar.
I LOVE reading people’s hazy memories. LOVE THEM. And then it’s so satisfying when other people figure them out!
Mine is not from childhood. There was a passage in a book where someone (I think the narrator looking back on the past?) describes how someone else went to an idyllic all-girls boarding school run by two ladies, and mentions that these two ladies lived together in a cottage on the grounds, “possibly fooling people, possibly not” (or something along those lines). That is all. That is literally all I remember. WHAT IS IT??
Also I think there is a Victorian flavor to everything in this, but I’m not sure.
Oh! I’ve either read this or heard an NPR story about it? I don’t know why my memory is making me think that it was just a radio story I heard but… I will think hard and check my bookshelf !
And, like, there are busts of previous headmisstresses around?
There could be!! Maybe there was a real-life thing you heard about on NPR and it was the basis of this allusion in this book? Would give us something to work with, at least!
The Lake of Dead Languages? by Carol Goodman
late 80s or maybe very early 90s. middle grade fiction, book about a kid who solves mysteries. each chapter is maybe a different mystery? not sure? and there was definitely something about some kid sneaking apple seeds into the school lunch and making everyone sick.
Encyclopedia Brown?
That sounds like a Trixie Belden book, The Hudson River Mystery? http://www.trixie-belden.com/books/series/book28….
Eat Your Poison, Dear by James Howie has someone poisoning the school lunches with apple seeds. It’s part of a series, but I think I only read this one (I borrowed it from my cousin years and years ago and it is still sitting on my childhood bookshelf (I’d be sorry for not returning it, but my cousin has plenty of my books that she hasn’t returned).
OH MY GOD THIS IS THE BOOK
THANK YOU SO MUCH
Is number 3 The Forever King by Molly Cochran and Warren Murphy.
NOPE.
Oh my gosh! Okay, this might have actually been a short story, not a book: a boy lives in a distopian future, and there’s some compound in all the food that makes everyone docile & suggestible. The boy reads a book about it (??), but when he goes back to the library the record is missing from the card catalog. I think the boy’s family watches a TV show about a rancher–it shows the rancher’s story from two opposing points of view, and the boy figures out it’s to remind all the viewers that every issue has two sides & corporations/governments are sympathetic, too. In the end he’s reading the back of a cereal box–it lists the compound as an ingredient & he can feel his will/discernment slipping away.
i can’t find anyone’s books for them, but i am going to stalk this page, figuring one of these out from memory is basically my life’s ambition.
YES! I’ve got two that have been eating away at me for years:
1. A short story. I want to say that the author is Irish, or perhaps some nationality in the UK, and is probably a man. It’s about a woman toward the end of her life who burns all her photos and possessions in her backyard. I want to say he wrote other short stories that were in rural settings, including one where a man found ruins on his property, or some very old wall, and was obsessed with it.
2. A middle grade book in the mid ’90s or maybe this was just a story in American Girl magazine? Either way, the main characters are writing an epic poem about Barbie, and one of the lines is something like “so they had to call the Roto-Rooter/who came by on his moto-scooter” and they submitted the poem to the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest epic poem but it turns out they just sent it to Alec Guinness and he sent them a nice letter back.
Okay, I remember the Alex Guinness thing SO vividly, and I’m pretty sure it was in a book (though I did read American Girl magazine, too).
Could it have been one of Candice F. Ransom’s Kobie books? Going on Twelve or one of those? The other one I’m thinking it might be is What It’s All About, by Norma Klein, which is about this girl Bernie who is a writer, whose mother and stepfather adopt a little girl from Vietnam, I think, named Suzu, and then they all go out to visit Bernie’s dad in California, who lives in a dome and they all dance outside in the rain, because that is of course what we do in California.
I definitely read no. 2 as a 9 year old. I still have the epic poem I tried to write to break the record for myself! I will be googling this further…
I am late but the first is Me and Katie the Pest by Ann M. Martin.
Nicole, is your number 2 book Guardian of the Dark by Bev Spencer?
I apologize in advance if this turns out to be a Francesca Lia Block book.
Story opens with a girl deciding to turn down pizza while rollerblading (?) in California someplace (probably LA). Obviously anorexic, as she talks about feeling “pure” and this theme shows up again during the book.
The weird part starts when she meets a guy with Andy-Warhol-like white hair and he takes her away to his mansion where, for some reason, he has zoo animals wandering around. (A tiger and a peacock.) The girl then proceeds to eat a whole feast with him, and he licks champagne foam off her thighs.
I am trying to find this book again because a friend of mine recommended I read it in college (but it was definitely not written for college level?!) and now that I have remembered it I want to read it again in order to try and figure out why the hell she recommend a book about anorexia-that-becomes-food-porn to me.
It sounds really similar to FLB’s The Hanged Man. I went and checked my copy and the pizza thing happens within the first 30 pages!
I have two I am looking for. I read both of them in the mid-late 90’s and they were written for either late elementary or middle school age group, I think
1. There’s a boy and a girl who sometimes slip into each other’s minds – like a silent passenger, except they get dizzy or maybe have small seizures when it happens? And they get to watch the other persons life. The boy is a prince of a made-up country. It made me obsessed with the idea of slipping into someone else’s mind – or someone slipping into mine.
2. This is pretty vague, but a boy is walking around mindlessly and finds a magic shop and gets a dragon. I know there is something about only getting to the shop if you aren’t trying to get to it. I think this may have been a series.
Thanks!
2. Sounds like Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville.
First one is Of Two Minds by Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman. The internet claims it will be reissued soon!
Number 2 sounds like Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher , by the delightful Bruce Coville.
Oh, #1! Contemporary setting? He’s a prince of a made-up European country? Their power/mind sharing situation changes once they’re in physical proximity? There may be some kind of kidnapping plot?
Yeah, no idea what it’s called (definitely not “Of Two Minds,” though), but you did not make this book up.
“Being of Two Minds” by Pamela Service?
I feel like I have so many details but Google is giving me nothing.
YA Novel from the 80s – high school girl befriends a ghost (teenager who died in the 50s) and hijinks ensue. Girl realizes she loves the ghost but they can never be because duh, he’s a ghost. THEN he comes back reincarnated and is a new student. Key words: the ghost’s name was super long so they abbreviated it to like T.U.E.S.D.A.Y or something and when he came back reincarnated it was a different abbreviation or something like THURSDAY. I swear he had the name Ulysses in there. (Google searching ghosts and Ulysses pulls up A LOT of Civil War entries.)
I do not know the title, but I remember that book, too! You are not alone.
Does the ghost smell like chocolate?
Oh, god, I ABSOLUTELY read this book, and just spent a half hour googling to no avail. I feel like the title was “Your Friend, Thursday (or Monday or Sunday BECAUSE I CAN’T REM EMBER WHAT DAY IT WAS)” but that’s giving me nothing. They go to a swap meet at some point, I think, and he…protects her from some jerky guys or something. And yeah, like brigidkeely said, I think he smells like chocolate.
This is MADDENING.
I remember this one too! It was driving me so crazy that I stayed up Googling until I found it: “Mad, Mad Monday” by the amazingly-named Herma Silverstein.
i am bummed that i cannot help out on the OP, but this short story is driving me crazy.
my teacher read this to us in the late 80s/early 90s. short story where a boy lives in a near future dystopia. at 16 all the kids take an iq test after being administered truth serum,and if you’re too smart, they euthanize you.
it was like the lottery, only about a million times more disturbing at the time!
Hi Kathleen, I think the story you are referring to is called “Examination Day.” It’s a short story by Henry Slesar. I don’t t think I’ve read the story, but I remember this as an episode of the mid 1980’s revival of The Twilight Zone. Here’s a wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examination_Day
This is so vague I can hardly remember any details, but this was a YA book, read maybe in the late 80s to early 90s. Teen protagonists, there were floating jellyfish like creatures I’m sure were called quarks or something similar. There was some parallel universe explanation, although initially scary they were found to be good. Any ideas? It’s been bugging me for years.
That almost vaguely sounds like Animorphs. Bad guys are parasites called yeerks.
I’ve got 2:
1) This is either a short story or an excerpt of a longer story. I’m pretty sure I read it in Cricket Magazine. It had black and white illustrations. A boy goes to visit someone… his grandma?… in an old Victorian house. he wakes up at night and finds other young people, kids his own age, and plays with them, including playing on a beach where one of the kids either drowns or almost drowns. Later on a family member produces a very old photo and the boy realizes that he’s in the photo, along with all his playmates, who are his grandma (?) as a child and her siblings and cousins. This is NOT “Tom’s Midnight Garden,” although both deal with time travel. I really wish Cricket had a listing of magazines with their contents, by date. I read this in the 80s or possibly early 90s.
2) A kid’s book with, I think, illustrations similar to “Harold’s Purple Crayon.” A boy goes on a very long walk to visit someone… his grandma?… and gets a little lost. Along the way he finds and eats wild strawberries. This may have been one story, with the book containing 3 stories.
I remember reading that first one! I’m pretty sure it was a stand-alone short story, though I didn’t read it in Cricket. I wish I could remember anything more about it, sorry! :/
Sometimes I wonder if I just make shit up, so it’s very gratifying to know somebody else has read the story even if they don’t remember the name of it. 😀 Thanks.
Fuck, I would kill for a comprehensive Cricket directory. I still have a shit ton of my old ones in my childhood bedroom, sorted by year. I read it religiously for years but your story isn’t ringing a bell, sorry!
Oh man, I read Cricket for so, so long. I’m looking forward to my kid being old enough for his own subscription. They’ve expanded their line & have a bunch of themed magazines (science! literature! poetry!) for different ages.
No idea on the first one, but I have had success emailing Cricket magazine directly and asking them vague questions about old stories– they sent me a pdf of one ages back for which I provided only the most bizarre of guidelines. It was amazing.
!!!
Fascinating!
Thanks for the response.
Do you have access to a university library? Larger public libraries might have this too. I just did a journal search for Cricket magazine, and EBSCO MasterFile offers that comprehensive listing of content you asked about. The records I could see went back to 1989.
A children’s book that I think may have originally come from my mother (circa 1950s) about forest animals who lived in a little community and all had their own little houses. A squirrel may have had his acorn cache stolen or it was somehow otherwise wrecked, and it was terribly cold out. He was found near death and brought to one of the animal’s little house to be revived and healed. There was some commentary about how squirrels have a number of caches to get themselves through the winter because they need to have backups in case one gets damaged or plundered. I think this was one story of several in the book. I remember thinking how cozy and terrific the little houses were.
Also, a book I read from the 1980s about kids who take a cross country van trip as a summer-camp type thing. There are other kids in vans taking the same trip. The kids in each van come up with a theme for their van and these kids were the Ambulance and painted a big cross on the side. One of the kid’s mother warned the counselor when they picked the kid up to start the trip that no one, under any circumstances, should give the kid any money, no matter how little. The kid ended up getting his hands on some, and through a series of trades and deals, ends up with thousands of dollars. They might have ended up in Las Vegas where he gambled.
No Coins, Please – Gordon Korman
That is totally, 100% it. Holy smokes.
My class in high school was assigned this book, but no one I’ve spoken to can remember more than a few hazy details.
The plot involved an old woman, a crying girl or child, a yellow cat, and the young girl being accused of doing something filthy. It may not have had a linear plot, and I believe different rooms of a building were a major theme.
Good luck!
Lots of these books sound awesome and have gone on my To Read list. I have two I’d like to find:
1. A kid was sent back in time (maybe repeatedly?) to stop a fire that killed a baby or a kid (that may have then been a ghost?). I remember candles and a stairwell were involved? No idea when I read this but it couldn’t have been later than the mid 90s.
2. A girl was being stalked by a vampire and when she tried to tell people about him she discovered he had removed the word “vampire” from her brain. I also read this back in the mid 90s, before stalker vampires were cool/sexy.
1. could be a Kathryn Reiss book (I think Pale Phoenix involved fire)–she had a lot of “historical ghosts compel present-day kids to fix their deaths” books. Here’s the 90s version; don’t be fooled by the 2003 reprint!
A beautifully illustrated children’s book about a girl who’s mother takes her to stay with an old woman (her grandmother?), and it turns out a lot more time passes than she thinks, and a whole war happened (WWII?) while she thought just a few days (weeks?) passed.
This is Dear Mili by Maurice Sendak, right?
There was a YA book series about a magical world and you could use magic (sort of… it wasn’t really magic) by tugging on invisible things in the atmosphere. There may have been dragons.
This is tenuous, but could it be Patricia C Wrede’s Dealing With Dragons series? The Kings of the Enchanted Forest can manipulate threads of magic in the air. And there are definitely dragons. Do the names Cimorene and Mendanbar ring a bell?
Almost definitely Patricia C Wrede. Such a good series, I must sign them out again. The ruler of the Enchanted Forest uses this sort of string magic. Kazul was the main dragon character, Morwen and Telemain witch/wizards.
Urg. I think the title is the main character’s first name. It’s a retelling of the Bluebeard myth, only it’s set in the present era. it’s on an island off the California coast, and she’s not his wife, she’s his daughter. It’s also established that her father is murdering and stuffing women he’s dated for crimes like dying their hair and suchlike.
And the evil captain who is complicit in her father’s murdering is named Captain Vega. And I think it might be a little bit racist?
I don’t recognise any of the three in the original post, but I read from a very narrow set of authors as a kid…
There’s a short story that’s been bugging me for years now – maybe YA from the early 2000s going by the tone and theme, but I may be way off there. It had a girl and a rose garden, and there was a witch or a fairy godmother or something. I think there were details or subtext about her mother and sister as well. The point of the story was that all the roses in the garden represented futures or wishes, and she could take a sniff from each before choosing one – I remember success/failure/sister dying from cancer because she smoked too much. I don’t remember the one she picked in the end though.
It’s really annoying remembering so many details but not being able to track the story down – I keep getting a dozen different results for books called The Rose Garden!!
This is Patricia C. Wrede’s AWESOME “Roses by Moonlight,” from Book of Enchantments, I think!
Love this book and this story!
Thank you, that’s the one! Though, strangely, I don’t recall any of the other stories from Book of Enchantments. I guess I must have “borrowed” the book off my sister for a half hour read while she was distracted with something else 😀
It was a fantasy romance where a woman was born on the steppes, gained a big cat as a companion (I think it was a snow leopard but I’m not certain), then met a guy who was some bigwig in a city and fell in love with him, and then the cat went back to the wild and she stayed with the dude. I thought it was called something like ‘The silver city’ or ‘The silver cat’ or ‘the snow cat’ or something but none of those titles seem to be right.
I read it over a decade ago, second hand, and the pages showed signs of age, but I’m not sure exactly how old it was.
I almost bought it at the time and then didn’t, and now the name has become an unsolved mystery in my life.
Sounds vaguely like The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, but the animal types don’t quite match up, so I wouldn’t be shocked if that wasn’t it.
I remembered another one! It severely creeped me out when I was younger, but my memories of it are all over the place and I’d like to read it again to work out what exactly was going on. Disclaimer up front: I may be making some of this up.
I think it was set on an alien planet. The native population has been subjugated and now works as housekeepers and other servants for the human invaders. They have recently taken to painting their fingernails silver (with detergent or something???) which it turns out is to signal to each other long distance in code as they plot revolution.
Meanwhile a young girl gets pregnant (I think she has to keep it secret because it’s forbidden) and she starts craving meat, and younger me thought this was going to be iron related but it turns out the babies are evil! Her boyfriend is warned to stay away from her because the babies will make her kill and eat him, and he is all ‘no she loves me it’s not true’ and then she does in fact kill and eat him.
Also I think there is a jelly egg? Of some dangerous creature? And maybe a pet that eats the jelly until it’s really full????
My memories are super confusing.
For #3, you might want to check out the Timeslip Tuesday tag at Charlotte’s Library. I don’t think there’s anyone who’s read more children’s time travel books.
http://charlotteslibrary.blogspot.com/search/labe…
I’m out of town so I’m catching up sporadically on The Toast when I see this thread. I hope I’m not too late to the party; all of the commenters books have either been hunted down or I don’t recognize them.
I’ve been trying to remember two books for the last few weeks and it’s eating away at my brain. Both are Halloween adjacent.
The first is a middle grade/early chapter book sort of thing. There may have been occasional illustrations. It was about a young girl’s first day at (middle?) school but she was a witch and all her classmates were mummies and werewolves and various monsters. I can’t remember if there was a rival or bully character, but I think there may have been.
The second was a short kid’s book, early reader, lots of rhymes as far as I can recall. I thought it was called Rich Witch, Stitch Witch but I can’t find any books with that title. There was definitely a lot of -itch rhymes. My husband suggested a book from his childhood called Which Witch Won, with witches racing and the slower one resorting to a vacuum instead of a broom to win. When I looked that up, I couldn’t find it either! So we either have two different mystery witch picture books or the same one that we both can’t recall the title of.
Any help would be so appreciated! Excellent thread! 🙂
I should also specify that I read both of these in the early/mid 90s. Probably no later than 95 or 96. The rhymingish witchy book could’ve been from the 80s or even 70s, but the chapter book was likely contemporary. Does that narrow it down?
The witch-riding-a-vacuum definitely rings a bell for me! Googling got this: http://www.amazon.com/The-Wednesday-Witch-Ruth-Ch…
which I don’t remember reading, but hey…
Also! a list of books with witches on vacuum cleaners: http://forums.abebooks.com/discussions/AbeBooksco…
Piggie Pie series of
Picture books by Margie Palatini feature Gritch the Witch…
Also a witch probably rides a vacuum in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (and does for sure in the movie of Hocus Pocus)
Could number 2 be “Which Witch is Which?” by Pat Hutchins? I remember reading it in kindergarten and it has stuck with me for some reason.
OK, this has been bothering me for so long, I’m so thrilled to see this thread here!!
I read this book in the early-mid 90s and in my memory it has a middle-grade feel to it. It was a hardcover (my copy, anyway) I think beige / sepia toned in color. The crux of the story is that this brother and sister (? they may just be friends but my brain remembers them as related) find a crow in the forest that’s been hurt/shot and they nurse it back to health. The crow, for some reason, can talk like a parrot, and will repeat the phrase “I got youv”– not a typo, the v on the end leads the kids to think that the person who shot the bird has this weird speech thing when they get excited, and then in the end the girl realizes that the shooter IS her brother / another (male) friend of theirs? This may be a corollary plot to another plot happening in the book, but I fixated on the bird thing bc I’m a bleeding heart for animals, lol.
Any help would be super appreciated. XD
ok, not the same story but it reminds me SO much of the Juniper Tree- a Grimm Fairy tale~
Could your book be “The Cry of the Crow”, by Jean Craighead George?
Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/The-Crow-Jean-Craighead-Geo…
Description: A gun blast wakes Mandy one morning. Someone in her family is shooting crows again. To Mandy’s father and older brothers. Crows are pests that have to be kept away from the farm’s valuable strawberry crop. Even her younger brother, Drummer, can’t wait until he’s old enough to learn to shoot. So when Mandy finds the helpless bady crow in the woods, she feedsans tames her in secret.As mandy’s bird grows, the wild crows try to lure her away. Knowing her crow must be free, but wanting to keep her as a pet, Mandy begins to realize that growing up is more complicated than she ever dreamed.
I checked this book out from the library over and over again in the early ’90s, but the book was almost definitely older. It started out with a young girl being put on the bus on June 1 to spend summer vacation with her cousins, and she was reading a book about Elizabeth I and was annoyed when a passenger kept asking her questions about the book. The cousins lived by a lake, I think? And then someone got poison oak? That’s all I remember even though I loved it so much.
Okay – this one has been driving me crazy for a very long time.
I read it in middle school like four times and have never seen it again. Never.
Its about a boy (I think) who starts in our world, walks into a forest in the snow and ends up in some fantasy land forest. In the forest he is attacked by some weird creature, and then he ends up at what in my mind was a castle or some sort and talks to people there.
The only other thing I really remember is that later in the book there are these cat creatures that are really awesome and different, kinda like silver cougars and I think they talk?
He goes about on a quest to help this land or something and eventually ends up making it back home. I am sorry my memory is so vague, its just been so long since middle school that the details have gotten muddled. And I swear it was way better than it sounds.
It was vaguely fantastical, possibly set in some alternative version of England, and there’s one scene with a monster who is a man with no skin. GO!
All I’m coming up with here is V for Vendetta, lol.
If it’s children’s / YA – Jane Yolen’s Wizard Hall? The monster is this constantly changing thing, and your description made me think of it, but I have no idea how man-like it was…
Secret of Platform 13 (http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-Platform-Eva-Ibbotson/dp/0141302860)? A group of magic folk enter London via a “gump” (portal) and in one scene meet a Nuckle, a human-horse hybrid with no skin, that lives in a lake in the park.
THIS WAS IT YOU ARE CORRECT A WHOLE YEAR LATER GOD BLESS
I stumbled upon the Toast a few weeks ago and have been lurking ever since, but this thread has me so delighted that I had to emerge from my hidey-hole to express my joy!
When I was little, I had this book of fairy tales that was purple and had a cover illustration that included (if I’m remembering correctly) the face of a man with a very impressive beard. I think the word “magic” was in the book title somewhere. The story I particularly remember was about a rat and a cuttlefish. It’s a variation on the old “one creature wants another creature to carry it across a body of water, and creature #2 is skeptical but gives in only to have its fears realized” tale. I remember very vividly the line, “The cuttlefish was softhearted, as molluscs are,” because it struck me as very funny even at the time. I believe the rat ends up eating all the hairs off of the cuttlefish’s head, and that’s why cuttlefish are bald. This may or may not have been the same book that contained the story of a bear who was sort of the bully of the forest and went around doing horrible things. Then some kind of accident befalls him and some other kind of woodland creature (a muskrat, maybe?) informs him, “You’re going to die,” and indeed he does.
Also, does anyone remember Lizard Music? That was my lost childhood book for years and years, and I had almost convinced myself I’d made it up. When I ultimately found it again, it was possibly more bizarre than I’d remembered.
Someone else has read Lizard Music!! It’s definitely one of my favorite books of all time. I brought it with me to college. I have no regrets. 😀
[no idea about the mystery book, though I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread to see if anyone else knows — that line about molluscs is brilliant.]
I remember being really disappointed for a while that I never found my way to that fantastic lizard city.
Hahaha oh no! Did you ever look for an intelligent chicken to guide you? 😀
Okay, I’ve got one!
This was a book my grade 1 teacher read to us, so 1992-ish. I think it was one of those really big picture books, but the art was so beautiful, and there was quite a lot of story, it took her a long time, days or weeks, to read it to us.
The main character is a man who builds a giant balloon with a cottage-basket hanging under it, and travels around the world, and ends up on Krakatoa, I think? And the volcano erupts but he and another person are safe because the part of the island they are standing on is above a diamond mine and so it wasn’t affected by the seismic activity?
This one is definitely The 21 Balloons by William Pene DuBois. The illustrations are awesome!
This was a mystery book for me for a while, too! I stumbled across it at a bookstore about a year ago and felt so vindicated. Like the other poster said, it’s definitely The 21 Balloons by DuBois.
This is the best thread in the world, geez! I have a bunch, but the biggest two are:
1) I can’t remember if the protagonist is a girl or a boy, but they are somewhere by the sea and they get turned into a whale, and live among the whales, learning their culture and where they travel. I don’t remember why, what else was going on, if there’s even a plot. Just: kid gets to be a whale.
2) There was a series of books about a large Jewish family in, I think, turn of the century New York. It followed their lives through the turn of the year, and had many loving descriptions of the traditional foods and holidays.
3) Another book I’d love to find was about an alternate world the child(ren) could get to, magical and fantastical, but not in the usual queens and princesses and fairies kind of way. The only other detail I can remember is that I think the secret password was MAYDAY.
Please help?
#2 is the All-of-a-Kind Family series, by Sydney Taylor. I love those books!
Number 3 is The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Andrews Edwards, a.k.a. Julie Andrews, a.k.a. Maria von Trapp. And it is, indeed, really great.
Is #1 Diane Duane’s Deep Wizardry?
I love this thread! My description is vague, but it’s probably been almost 30 years since I read this:
Mine is a short story for elementary or middle schoolers. It is about a family that has a visitor who seems to be from the future. The visitor is a boy who has clothes and shoes of very fine materials that the family has never seen before. He’s a vegetarian. The family’s neighbors are very close minded, and find out about the visitor and want to do something bad to him. There’s a vivid description of the neighbor woman’s beady, mean eyes. Somehow the visitor escapes in the end.
sounds a bit like The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key.
Thanks for this thread! I’ve just slacked off for 2 hours at work reading through it. It’s so good it’s prompted me to post for the first time.
The book I’m looking for is unfortunately a children’s picture book which makes it much harder to find. Also, it didn’t have a coherent narrative – great. The friend who showed it to me told me that an author had gone into a book publisher with single page sketches 10 or so proposed stories, one sketch for each and said “let me know if you want to publish them”. The drawings were incredible and detailed, but then he never came back again, so they just published the book as a series of unrelated vignettes, all of which were kind of “film noir” style.
I remember seeing it around 1994-96, when I was a bit old for that sort of book. It has dark black and white sketched images. Or perhaps it was just a dream…. no one I know has any idea of what I’m talking about! Thanks!
This sounds like The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg.
I’m late to the game, but this book has been bugging me for years now. I would have read it around 1995 or so. Definitely a YA novel with a mystery theme. A teen girl was an apprentice/assistant to a private eye after school and was learning the ropes of being a PI. It was narrated by her and and she either took on a case without her boss knowing or had to solve his murder/disappearance/attack or something (I might have pulled that last part from An Unsuitable Job For A Woman, which I read much later). I clearly remember her teaching what she was learning to the reader, in particular explaining that AKA means “also known as”, which I didn’t know when I read this at 10 or so. My memory tells me the cover was red.
A book about a teenage girl who gets turned into a dog (possibly by a homeless person?) and finds 2 other dogs (male) this had also happened to. Half convinces her family she’s their missing daughter but then runs away. There’s a bit where she’s in heat and her friends are desperate to mate with her (one or both do). What the hell was this called?!
Was is “Lady: My Life as a Bitch” by Melvin Burgess? http://www.amazon.com/Lady-My-Life-as-Bitch/dp/08…
I never read it but I remember seeing it in the library.
I am looking for a teen ghost story book about a girl who is haunted by a ghost from her grandmother’s childhood. She also finds her grandma’s old diary and reads through it. In it she realizes that the ghost was one of her grandmother’s classmates and was jealous of her because she was the teacher’s favorite. The teacher even tried to give the grandmother the answers to an exam to help her be the top student. That’s when the diary ends and the girl wonders what her grandmother ended up doing.
The girl also makes friends with a girl (I think her name was Tony?) who has a handicapped foot? I remember that one of the ghost scenes ends in an old abandoned school house.
Anyone know this book?
Out of the Dark, Betty Ren Wright
OK here is another book. It was a child’s book and all I remember is that it was about fairies who fell to earth in raindrops. I remember there being really cool pictures of the fairies in the raindrops. Vague but I have no clue what it was called or who it was by.
Oh, my, is it too late to ask about books? There are two titles I’m trying to remember:
1) One was something that I either read in 6th grade or that was read to us in class, about 1981. Two boys on a quest where they had to find three strings and braid them together, and they had a yin-yang symbol that glowed whenever they got near one of the strings. The title had the word “Other” in it. Google’s not helping me find anything….
2) The other is a story from around 1980 about two girls, I don’t know if they were friends, sisters, or cousins, who knew this old woman — might have been their grandmother — who had these devices that basically allowed them to be superhuman. One was a pair of boots that would take you several thousand miles with each step, and the girls used one boot each and ended up in Mexico, where they met another girl named Pilar. They did get home — that was just one adventure they had.
The first book, in particular, is something I really want to find again. Thanks.
I know the second one! It’s What the Witch Left by (hang on, must Google) Ruth Chew. I think it’s been reprinted recently, but the original 1973 cover is here ( http://randomlyreading.blogspot.com/2013/09/what-witch-left-by-ruth-chew.html ) along with a synopsis of the story.
(I tried to send this once but it glitched and I don’t think it posted. Sorry if it double-posts!)
The second one is What the Witch Left, by Ruth Chew. It’s apparently been reprinted recently with a different cover, but you’d probably remember the original 1973 cover, which is here ( http://randomlyreading.blogspot.com/2013/09/what-… ) along with a synopsis of the story.
Thank you! Yes, that’s definitely the second book.
I’ve been looking for this book since my eldest son was born 30 years ago.
I read it before I was 7, so it was picture story book that took place in Paris. I can remember the pictures to this day and perhaps why the scenes are still so vivid to my memory.
The main character was a lonely boy who was driven everywhere (mostly school,) by his Father’s chauffeur in a huge fast low slung car that raced thru the streets of Paris and he was fascinated by the life on the streets outside the windows of the car and his parents apartment.
One night he is outside alone below his home on the street the outdoor cafes looks menacing and frightening to him because of the fierceness of the wind which is blowing the tightly closed umbrellas.
He becomes aware of crying and sees a boy crawling around and discovers he is looking for ‘fags’, I remember this astonishes the wealthy boy as he thinks of all the cigarettes his father has, even more so when he learns he is crying because he doenst have enough for his ‘boss’ so he begins to help him.
Then it gets very hazy but somehow they are transported to another country Persia I believe thru a hole in a fence perhaps (?) where they eat juicy melons. I think this is where the poor boy is orginally from.
Somehow the lesson learned seemed to be that we are all poor in our rights.
I cannot remember the title or the rest so nay help would be appreciated.
I grew up in the sixties, does this book twig any memories?
Kind regards!
I am looking for a book that would have come from the Scholastic catalog in the late 80s or very early 90s. Story was about a foster family who adopted children with varying disabilities and the main character was a high school aged girl who was not disabled. She struggled fitting into the family culture, but eventually grew to love them and was officially adopted. At some point in the story, the foster mother (and maybe sisters, too) made the main character a bunch of clothes that could mix and match to create endless outfits.
This is a really old book a teacher read to me when I was in second grade and I would really love to find it.
The book is about two orphaned twins. One a girl and one a boy. They both have red hair and i forget if it was the girl or the not but they saw a lady that looked similar to them in there foster home or orphanage and dreamt about what if she was there mom, well later they are adopted by this I think older couple, the boy seems to get along with the woman and the girl with the man, the boy and the woman seem to garden if I remember right and the girl and the man went fishing or rafting once and the raft flipped and I forget who saves who but there glad there safe, there’s also these two Other characters, I think this blond guy and this sleazy guy they overhear the old couple say they buried money or something in a box and go to dig it up but something happens and in the end of the book the twins put a box of there own with something in the ground and are happy to be in a loving home and then the blond guy is there father saying (in his mind I guess or something) that there his children and that he doesn’t know what happened to the woman but one of them put them up for adoption because he knew he couldn’t take care of them but he will tell them one say If I remember right.
I know this doesn’t give you a lot to work with and it may be really mixed up but this book is one of my favorites and I really would like to know what it’s called,
Mine might actually be the same as the #3 up there but I’m not sure. All I remember is that a group of kids end up meeting the ghost of King Arthur and he helps them with their quest. This scene may have took place in the ruins of a castle.
it was a book about i think i highschool boy, and he had a ghost who would visit him and became his friend. This is quite vague, but i remember that there was tobogganing and i think that is how the ghost died, and at some point the ghost saved the boys loved ones from either being hit by a car or from being in a car accident. the book was from either the 80s or the 90s.
My mother found my name in a book, which she must have been reading around 1975, in the book there was a character, her name was Princess Maura, she doesn’t remember anything about the book but I would like to find it, for obvious reasons, if anyone has any suggestions on how I can locate it, I would be very grateful!
Thank you,
Maura
Looking for a YA book, I read it back in high school but it was a bit young for me. It’s about a brother and sister that move to an old house and out in the woods are these creatures. No it’s not ‘Spiderwick’.
Anyways there’s this big fight and one of the creatures loses their eyes, so the brother (Who is older) give the creature one of his eyes. I remember there was an eyeball on the cover of the book in one of the letters. More than likely an ‘O’. I’ve been looking for this book for darn near 15 years.
this is a childrens book in the late 80’s. it involves a snake in the forest with a swan and green creatures trying to be quiet. pleeease help
Ok I really hope someone can put a name to this book! It’s been driving me crazy for about two years now! I read it in high school. I remember the cover has a picture of a young girl riding a snow leopard.. Into battle possibly? Her father ( the king I believe ) does and leaves her in charge of the impending war. She falls in love but has to attend to her duties first and foremost!
Is it The Cry of the Icemark?
A story about a young girl who is servent/apprentice to an older woman who is a teacher. In this society, teachers dress in black. A man is upset that the girl, who is beautiful, is on track to become a teacher. Another career path is one of “lady”. The young girl is interested in this career. As a deterrent, the teacher shows the girl a video of a lady at the end of her work day. The lady removes her belt, bracelets, wig, (and possibly) her makeup. It shows that the lady’s beauty is all artificial. I think the action of this story occurs in a castle. There is a question of hidden treasure or something of value hidden. I would love to read this again if I could get the story’s name. It has almost a Le Guin feel, but I have checked all her short stories. The story is sci fi or fantasy but had a elements of gothic genre.
Hi ~ I’m over a year & a half late to the party. Found this phenomenal thread via Google. Does anyone want to reactivate? I’m looking for a juvenile novel for approx. 4th to 6th graders, +/- , which was likely written in the 1970s (perhaps ’60s, or early ’80s at the latest).
…The protagonist is a dark-eyed girl (all the characters are Caucasian) who becomes friends with the new girl who recently moved to her town and joined her class/school. When the new girl is first introduced by the teacher to the class, the girl looks rather shaggy, her hair covering much of her face, her posture slouched, & not particularly attentive to her own appearance. Though this is a bit of a turn off, the protagonist nonetheless begins to enjoy the girl’s uniqueness and company, and periodically has a weird sense of having seen/met her before.
…Midway through the book, the pair of friends are fooling around casually while taking a theater class that includes how to put on make-up, and the protagonist is stunned to behold that her friend, whose hair is pulled back away from her face, looks “positively beautiful”. It turns out, the new girl spent a little while being a child actor, and did a very high-profile TV commercial (possibly for breakfast cereal?). The protagonist finally figures this out. Her friend explains that she’s embarrassed about it, plus she didn’t want it to influence how her new schoolmates regarded her.
…Meanwhile, the new girl’s mother appears quizzical whenever glancing between the protagonist & her parents. The protagonist does not understand this woman’s confusion. Both parents are very fair, including having blue eyes. The protagonist ultimately learns that her biological father died after she was born (possibly after serving in a war?), and was raised as child of the man her mother subsequently married.
This was a really terrific book — probably middle-grade — and I would really LOVE to know the name of it, which I cannot for the life of me remember. Any thoughts and help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much!
There are two books I haven’t been able to get off of my mind for years! I praaaay you guys can help me before I go mad.
The first is about a girl who has lived in a dome city her entire life. Then she begins learning secrets and seeing how weird the place she lives is. Her friends boyfriend ends up being one of the undercovers who seek out seekers like her. She learns of the tunnels (i think once subway stations) that lead out of the dome city that are going to be sealed forever so in the end she makes her way down them, and survives. Meeting her grandmother on the other side. Its just really trippy and awesome anyone have any ideas?
The other one is where a young girl is sent to an all girls private school, she ends up having to clean as a servant like the african american girl because her dad dies and cant pay. She starts learning of a girl who had just died and all the cover ups. She meets a boy outside and starts falling for him but the ghost of the girl warns her and starts showing her the truth. In the end the teachers end up being part of this cult that sacrfices people to keep this man alive. Its crazy but awesome. Any takers?
Mine is a children’s book that is about a boy and a girl who are siblings and I they’re staying with then aunt and uncle for the summer and they’re on the beach and the boy finds a message in a bottle in the ocean and after he finds the bottle he starts to have magical powers and I think she maybe does later too? That’s all I remember
OK so its about this girl who’s grandfather is either a dryad or a wood fairy. She plays the violin or the fiddle. It has an epic battle and there is a book that helps her I think. I rember something happens to her hair and the trees have faces. Can anyone help its a YA chapter book.
This sounds a lot like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
I’m looking for a book that I read in middle school (early 2000s). I don’t remember the title or author, or even very much of the plot (there was a girl, a family secret, houses around a lake, and possibly a key) but I do remember the cover. It was light yellow or tan with minimalist drawings of willow trees and houses around a lake. The houses might or might not have had a hedge around them. Something about the book kind of haunted me, but I don’t think it was a particularly scary story. Please help!
Bless you. I've been searching for this book for years.