White-beveled thick hardback book.
Don’t remember the dusk jacket if any.
Received as 11th birthday gift from my grandmother in 1974.
Title was simple and had something to do with a girl.
Something with a somber feeling.
I never read it.
I kept it for almost 40 years and then gave it to a niece.
No one can place it.
My grandmother was fluent in French so after doing some research I decided it was Nobody’s Girl, the french translation, but in a google image search none come up with the same look that I recall.
The pages may have had gold tint on the edges, but maybe not.
That’s all I got.
Thank you.
Nobody’s Girl = En Famille = Adventures of Perrine by Hector Malot had many different editions. Mine had a white-on-pink dust cover, so that’s the way I remember it, but the binding was apparently a mottled white – see one of the images at:
https://culturalheritagebooks.com/collections/childrens-books/products/nobodys-girl-by-hector-henri-malot-translated-from-en-famille-by-florence-crewe-jones
If yours had the pink dust cover, you probably wouldn’t remember it as somber. It was, however, a rather heavy read for kids brought up on modern children’s literature. So it could easily be a book that one owned, but never read.