Looking for a pre-teen girl book I read in the late 80s/early 90s that was already really dated. The girl in the book is going through puberty and gets her period. But the maxi pads still have the belt and the hooks. My friend and I just saw Are you there God? and for the life of us we can’t remember this book. They may have also been a part about keeping notes in a notebook about puberty.
I read this book as a teen in the early 1970s. It had a typical teen book dust jacket design from the 70s: pen/watercolor painting of profile of boy with blue hair (I think) and I have a memory that it was called “The Blue Boy” or something similar but all searches have turned up nothing appropriate.
Anyway, this memory is decades old, but what I recall is that this teen boy (probably orphan? no parents present in the story that I can recall) is somehow involved with a gang of bad people. Perhaps boy has magical abilities that they are taking advantage of for ill-gotten gains? Perhaps boy has blue hair as a gimmick? Maybe there is no blue hair but I swear there was. In any event, boy decides to escape from his situation and is pursued by bad guys who want to recapture? kill? otherwise cause problems for him. Boy is on the lam and has an unexpected mysterious ally who brings him food and perhaps finds him safe spaces to live. In my memory this ally is a talking mongoose, but crikey, how does this narrative even make sense? The boy is astonished to get ripe mangoes when in his world (the world of our narrative), mangoes are still green and unripe; months and months away from ripeness. It turns out this ally is from a parallel world, and the book ends with the ally helping our boy escape his pursuers by moving to the parallel universe. In my memory, book ends with boy on a sunrise-shining beach in this parallel world.
I read it in English, but nothing about the story seems to be set in North America (mongoose and mangoes, or at least mangoes even if the mongoose is a figment of my imagination or faulty memory).
I have a query for you: I was delighted in a seek-and-find book as a child in the mid-1990s which, if my memory serves me correctly, followed a globe-trotting aunt. The reader was always one stop behind her, and to try to catch her was required to find objects and people in each image spread.
The book was large, slim, hard-backed, and had relatively little text. As usual for this genre, the images were visually busy illustrations in a reasonably realistic style. I have no memory of the title nor the author, but I do remember that some of the locations included an Australian beach (with people wearing white sunblock on their noses), a wet market in Asia (lots of produce and people wearing straw hats) and an airport scene with a man tearing up his tickets. I am fairly certain there was also a scene of people at a ski lodge with lots of snow and chair lifts, but that image is less clear than the others. Each of these scenes took up a full two-page spread.
I read it between 1994 and 2000, although I do not know if it was published before that.
Here is the description:
I am trying to locate a children’s illustrated book that i had in England, that was likely published in the 1980’s , but definitely not after the early 1990’s. It had beautiful detailed illustrations, and was about 2 sheep investigating different areas, such as beaches and tidal pools. The illustrations were amazingly detailed, for instance, the tidal pools would be covered in rocks, bottles, animals, sea weed, plants etc- you could look through the individual pages for hours on end, but the stories always involved the two white sheep. They were drawn realistically, and not “cartoony” at all. I believe it may have been a series of books. Please let me know if you have any information!
Key aspects:
>>>> -About 2 sheep exploring new places
>>>> -realistic and extremely detailed illustrations
>>>> -Likely part of a series of books
>>>> -Purchased in England, likely a European publication (but not sure)
>>>> -Printed circa 1980’s-early 90’s if not earlier
Please please can you see if you can identify this for me? I would love to be able to show my own children this!
Please let me know if you need any further information! I also commented on the Disqus back in august 2018 but it is so far back I could not locate my comment. It’s possible someone may have replied
Hello, Stumpers. To the best of my memory, this is a Children’s Paperback Picture Book, circa 1980.
It was set in a woods, populated with monsters, near a lake that featured heavily. I think our protagonist – a girl monster whose face resembled a purple baby dinosaur, and who wore a red dress with puffy sleeves – saw her reflection in the water and got scared, or didn’t understand it was her.
It was beautifully illustrated line work, trying to make things look realistic with texture and shading, versus the looser style and flat coloring of a Mercer Mayer or Richard Scarry.
This is a book set in Wales, a lot of focus on the Moors of Wales. Possibly a YA love story book. About a royal and a civilian… I believe a prince and a “common” girl. One of the characters, I believe the girl, talks of a string that connects the two together and somewhere in the story the string gets cut.
Teenage girl somehow loses family in big city, sets off to relative’s home in another state on foot sleeping in barns, scraping together coins for food along the journey. Read in the late 60’s early 70’s school library.
A picture book that goes through the rooms of a house at night showing objects that are places in a way to make it look like faces/people etc. I have a particular memory of a garden/shed page and a bathroom page for sure! If there is a story component to the book I don’t remember it unfortunately. Read sometime between 2000-2008 I think.
I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of details in trying to identify this book, but here’s what I’ve got:
It was a young adult book that came out in the early to mid-‘80s – I want to say no later than 1985. It was told first person from the view of a teenaged girl with a very strict mother who monitored everything she did. The girl (I don’t remember her name) didn’t fit in at school and wanted to have clothes like the cool girls – I think the mom insisted on sewing all the girl’s clothes herself. She secretly went shopping and bought a pink angora sweater and cranberry-colored corduroys and had to hide them from her mom.
I also seem to remember that the cool girls were riders at the local horse stables, and the girl wanted to ride there to be like them, even though she didn’t know how to ride. What sticks out most in my memory is that the writing style was very formal and stilted. I remember one such sentence: “The following morning, rain was falling when I woke.” Another was when the mom ultimately discovered the girl wearing the secret outfit and “Mother knelt to examine the construction” of the pants.
I had this paperback children’s book in 1970. It is probably from the 60s. It is an American book with words. The illustrations were line drawings.
All I remember is that an old man lived possibly on a hill. The town was having a cleaning contest, and he cleaned every bit of his house, and I distinctly remember he even cleaned the cobwebs out of the corners. The people came to judge his house and he won. This may not be right, but my memory comes with the color yellow. Maybe the cover- or maybe the man wore yellow. I’ve tried and tried to find this book.