Author Archives: admin

237C: “Always keep a spoon with you…”

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I have been thinking about this book a lot lately. No idea of the title.
The story (fiction) was about a young child (girl? boy?) who went on a train ride with someone? something? else, and was offered some jam — or marmalade — to try. However, the young child did not have any utensil to use to dip into the marmalade. This is the part that has stuck with me to this day: the companion gave the advice to the child “…always keep a spoon with you, because you never know when someone will offer you something to try” — or words to that effect.
This advice made a major impression on my young mind, and to this day I always carry a metal spoon with me.
I would love to read this story again. Would you help me find it?

237B: Companion Novels from the 80s: The Victim’s Perspective, The Bully’s Perspective (Solved)

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In the early 90s or late 80s, I remember reading two novels for kids. They were both about a boy being bullied. One was from the perspective of the victim and one from the perspective of the bully. I can’t find them anywhere. The only other detail I can remember is that some of the bullying took place in the neighborhood. It’s a fuzzy memory and maybe I dreamed it. Maybe it was only a chapter or two in the same book even. I was sure it was Blume or Cleary but I searched their books and couldn’t find anything like this. I do know that Wonder has a new companion novel from the perspective of the bully but this is clearly different. Thanks!

237A: Book of Fairy Tales Containing This Unusual Story

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Physically, it was dark blue or dark green (dust jacket was long lost). I read the book in the 70s, but it was much older. I would guess it was published in the 30s or 40s. It had simple black and white illustrations.
There was one story (whose name I can’t remember) about two children — a brother and sister who are in the woods. They come to a tree stump with a strange knot on it. When they sit on the stump and touch the knot, they fall into an underground world. There, they are tormented by scary monsters. They … do … something (sing a song about being brave, maybe) and the monsters turn into fairies. It turns out that they were fairies all along, and had been cursed to be monsters until someone did that thing. One of the monsters looked like a giant carrot.

236I: A steampunkish picture book

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Early 90s, I was 8-10 years old, I had this favorite book. It was wider than it was tall (maybe 12” x8”?) paper back and maybe 20 pages or something thin like that. I don’t remember there being a main character, but all the pictures where lots of shades of brown and copper. I would even say steampunkish. The plot had something to do with the machine having an assembly line of all these different gadgets. I vaguely remember gears or oil…I’m pretty sure it was very fantasy and even some anthropomorphism with the machines. Any ideas?

236G: A collection of sports biographies

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Trying to find book I was given as a kid around 1960-1963(?) with short bio’s and drawings of athletes; I remember bio’s included Babe Zaharias, George Mikan, Jesse Owens, and Mo Connelly. It was a book for kids along the type of format as “Two Flags Flying” or “Illustrated Minute Biographies” with a bio and drawing of the person in each case.

236F: 80s sci-fi

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A sci fi book or short story (read in the 80s): some people from our time/Earth ended up in the future (or another planet). The two main protagonists (guy and girl) recognize/identify each other by the marks of chickenpox vaccination on their forearms.

236E: Boy with special power

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Book I can’t remember details of:
Genre: Fiction/Fantasy (Most likely young adult/teen fiction)
Time Read: 5-7 years ago
May have been a paperback
Plot points: Main character is a boy, found/kidnapped after some tragedy (burning village?).
Kidnappers include a pair of twins? that have some sort of snake/venom/acid power.
They are encountered and defeated by another group of twins, who can control lightning or something like that.
(big time gap missing in memory)
Boy is taken to some sort of fortress/academy/institution and trained to fight, and ride large raptors?/bulls? which he enjoys a lot as he understands/knows a lot about them
He makes a rival out of his roommate or a rival is picked for him from one of the boys at the academy, not sure which. They get in fights (I think?).
There is a spot out in the training field of the academy with two buildings, one of them being a black isolation sort of box where people go in and experience things that terrify them and come out determined not to mess up again.
There is a test at some point where the boy has to travel through a very foggy area with a bunch of dangerous creatures to an old abandoned tower.
To graduate the academy there is a crucible/gauntlet/arena where he has to kill/defeat his teacher.
There is a love interest? who is the princess?(maybe) of a nation of people with beast powers.
In this book world there are people with powers that come from bloodlines and/or animals and/or eye colours and the powers generally stay within the kingdoms they originated from.
There is a character in some part of the book from a royal family that pushed their sibling/infant sibling/ or the heir to some throne from a window causing a severe injury which can be healed by the main character or something like that.
The main character has a power that allows them to view things from long distances, invade people’s minds, see spirits?(maybe), and other things like that.
Main character is maybe/likely an orphan, some part of the book involves a revealing of who exactly his parents (Father specifically) were.

236D: A boy and his wolf

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I remember this book from when I was a kid, my dad first introduced it to me.
The book is set in late colonial period I think and is about a young impoverished boy and his family. The town in which he lives finds a wolf den, and he is the only one who can go down into the den. He agrees to go but for a price, he gets to keep one pup. The townspeople agree and when he goes down he finds five or six pups still alive. He picks one and comes out with it, telling everyone that it was the only one alive. He takes the wolf and begins to raise it. I know he watches an bald eagle kill a hawk, which he then takes to his professor/taxidermist friend and sells to him. That is about all I can remember.