I wonder if you can help me find a book!
Here’s what I can recall:
– A children’s book with a cover that, I believe, featured a pretty girl in a bright pink dress, cool 60’s cat-eye sunglasses, and perhaps a head scarf to cover her blond hair, driving a convertible into what looks like a dark tunnel in a mountain.
– I want to say the main character’s name is Lydia but I’m not certain
– She ends up in a dark, spooky house and freaks out the people? monsters? living there because of all of her bright colors
– She doesn’t seem scared of any of the spooky details, and she tries to turn their house into a nicer place with bright colors
– It’s not a spooky book, it’s silly and light, probably designed for readers in the 6-10 years age range?
– Based on the way she was dressed I’d say it was set in the late-60s but can’t be sure that that’s when it was written. The colors felt more 80s or 90s to me (lots of hot pinks and neon greens).
As fate would have it, I’m looking for the same picture book.
Thank you for your detailed description. You’re right about the lady on the cover with the angular cat-eyed glasses. She wasn’t drawn with eyes or pupils, just the white lenses, if I recall.
Some more clues:
– The picture book was very thin, not a hardcover, and was coming apart at the seams when I read it as a child in the 1990s. It was a hand-me-down, and as a child I thought it looked exotic and different (due to what I considered a ‘1980s look’ with triangles, bright neon colors, etc.), so my guess is it was published in the mid-to-late 1980s or early 1990s.
– I couldn’t remember the actual plot and thought maybe it was about a real estate agent lady trying to find a home for Halloween monsters, like Frankenstein, the Mummy, maybe Dracula the Vampire, Wolfman or Werewolf, etc. Maybe she found a big, stone castle for them to live in? The book wasn’t marketed as a Halloween book, but as a child it was part of my Halloween-time reading due to the monsters, which I liked. As you said, the monsters weren’t scary or threatening at all. (If anything, they found her scary? As a child, it reminded me of the Munsters TV show reruns, both having a beautiful blonde being unfazed by monsters.)
– I thought the title might be something long, e.g. a quote or sentence from the book… ‘All around town’, ‘Looking for a place’, ‘How about this?’, or something along those lines. There might have a question mark at the end of the title.
– If memory serves, the illustrations looked like they had been drawn in colored pencil or highlighter marker but outlined in thin black ink. Characters were tall and thin, with sharp angles for the chin, etc. I might be wrong, but my point here is that the overall drawing style is a simple hand-drawn cartoon or comic look… not detailed paintings or anything typical of other kids’ books at the time.
Here’s to finding this forgotten gem!