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312N: The Blonde Bully

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Ok…I’m going to try to be as detailed as I can but at the same time I don’t know if it’s exactly from what I remember or if it’s like I’m thinking about other things but it is a children’s book I read it when I want to say I was in like third grade which was 92-93. The book had a main character that had blonde curly hair and she was a bully that wouldnt share the swings OR she wouldn’t share her candy with the kids in the playground. I can’t remember if  it was that she bribed everyone with the candy or she wouldn’t share. But the colors in the book we’re very light pastel colors and I want to say she either had a purple top or a pink top with purple or pink pants. The whole book was about her being a bully and not sharing and a swing and a bag of candy where the main objects. It has been bugging me for the longest time that I cannot remember this book because this used to be one of my favorites and I have searched high and low on the Internet and I cannot find it!

312L: Squirrel That Was A Garbage Man

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I’m secretly trying to find this book for my husband.as a child and always talks about it. It is a children’s picture book about jobs that people do at night. However, the characters in the book are animals. I think he said there’s a squirrel that’s a garbage man?I could be off, though. I can’t really remember anything more than that. It goes through a handful of night jobs and describes what each of them does. He can’t remember a title or author.

312K: People Across The Lake

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The book I’m looking for would have been written before 1990. It would be fiction it would be about a prehistoric tribe that believes that although there were once other people (the lake people or the people across the lake) they are the only people left (they’re either ‘the people’ or the people of the forest, forest people, etc.). One of the main characters would be a girl named Zillah or a variant thereof. She has an overbearing father and at the end of the book she either dreams she sees or actually sees a person in a boat floating towards her on the lake.

 

312J: Medieval Castle (Solved)

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Children’s fantasy adventure with magic model boat and Ramses II I’m looking for a children’s book. Set in Britain, I think in the 1930s, and written then. Basic plot starts with a boy discovering a strange ‘antiques’ shop in a seaside town. In it is a model boat / ship, I think of a Viking longboat, which he acquires. Boat becomes a means to various time travel adventures to the past for boy and his family (brother & sister, or were they cousins?) which an adventure in ancient Egypt that involved rescuing Pharaoh Ramses II from an ambush by the Hittites at the Battle of Kaddish, visiting a medieval castle and later bringing back the daughter of the castle to ‘modern’ England – she is terrified by a motor car she thinks is a dragon. One other plot point. The boy tries to find the shop again once he discovers the boat is magic but cannot. But some time later does find it and knows he has to give up / return the magic boat model. I know I read it as child (1950s) but only came to mind when I came across a little Viking longboat model in a curio shop. Nice model, but not magic! Many thanks for any pointers.

312I: Missing Man

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I’m looking for a fantasy book I read in the 80’s or 90’s. I believe the author was a woman. The story was about a man that is pulled into a fantasy world by a broken down cripple, to impersonate a guy that disappeared. There’s a stone that’s embedded into his skin, with memories. He has to convince an old wizard, and a beautiful woman. He also has to confront a bad guy. In the end, it’s revealed that the broken down guy is the missing guy, and that he was corrupted and broken by the evil guy.

312G:Bad Colors

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It’s from the first person point of view of a teenage girl. She has gone through some trauma; perhaps her dad has recently died? There’s some kind of new situation in her life. I think she’s living with her aunts? She was raised by New Age-y, witch-y types. It’s a realistic novel. Her immediate family are these flakey hippies, who have brought her up to be very superstitious. I think they read Tarot or some kind of divination for a living. She is beset with some problem; maybe she cuts herself? Over the course of the book, she learns to extricate herself from their superstition and magical thinking. They have a particular fixation on colors, with certain colors being good or bad luck. Yellow is very bad; it can’t be mixed with black. Purple is very significant & has to do with spirituality. The book ends with her on a therapist’s couch and she notices right away that it’s one of the “bad” colors, but then she reminds herself that that’s OK, that she’s going to dispense with this OCD-like fixation on the “right” color patterns & not be bound by her family’s backward ways.

312F: Rattle Windows And Shot Down Chimney’s

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I remember looking at this book in the mid 80s, so it was probably published around that time or before. It was a large book and, as I recall, every page was completely filled with a full-colour image of many inventions/contraptions, all set in context. I don’t recall there being any narrative.
 one page showed a house with all the rooms in view. Each room had things going on all annotated with detailed little notes. I remember the bathroom had a special invention that allowed a cheeky child to lie in a bath without getting wet. Built into this contraption was a hidden computer game console which allowed them to secretly play games (to me this dates the book in the 80s). To emulate the sounds of him bathing, another contraption stood near by called the “bath-farter” or something.
Another page showed a huge wheel of mischief rolling down a street with arms extending from it. These arms could rattle windows or throw sot down chimneys. Again – the wheel was annotated with many notes

312E: A Boy Living In A Village

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I read this book sometime in the 80-84 time frame, possibly slightly earlier and no later than 1985.
I only recall that a boy was living in a village and he was training at various occupations – mining chalk (?) possibly from some chalk downs, studying astronomy and such things.
He at some point runs away or gets away and falls into some sort of underground crypt where he encounters the remains of some warrior lying there with a green stone axe on its chest.
He takes the axe….and that’s the last I remember.