Three books in a series; time travelers from England arrive on bleak ocean shore, conch shell (speaking?) plays a role; more adult than Narnia; some quest of right and wrong played out; overall somewhat sad and full of loss as story unfolds.
I’m trying to find a chapter book about a young boy and an older woman who search for a prize-winning cookie recipe.
They want to win a cookie baking competition, so the older woman searches the library in her house for her family’s best recipe. She either loses it or can’t find it. She had a pet named Peeves who might have been responsible somehow. She realizes that they can use the second-best recipe, which originally belonged to one of her female relatives, if they can find it in time. The search takes them to either a shack or an abandoned house on a hill where they find a recipe for aniseed cookies. There may have been ghosts or a graveyard involved. The old woman rushes home and bakes the cookies in time for the contest, where they win first prize.
The book was for middle readers; I think it was about the same length as an Encyclopedia Brown book. I read the book before the year 2000, and I’m fairly sure it was written after 1960.
Family buys land from a crooked farmer. He tries to trick them & sells them a pond, but the water evaporates and it’s the richest dirt ever.
Mean farmer uses shotgun to plant seeds b/c his land is so hard, family has to jump out of the way when they plant seeds b/c plants shoot up so fast.
Many odd animals live on the land: one has different length legs so that it can walk on the incline of the sides of the pond/hill. Another is a “hide behind” that you can never see, just leaves tracks. Once when a member of the family is working they get pinched/poked & turn around so fast that the “hide behind” tires to hide behind itself.
Father eats biscuits hot out of the oven – then a tornado comes & the rest of the family is blown away. The biscuits cooled in his stomach & turned to cement, so he’s weighed down & saves his family.
Every time the mean farmer tries to cheat the family, they end up coming out ahead. The stories (tall tales) are funny & geared toward younger children.
I hope you have luck finding this story – it would be wonderful to read it to my son.
I’m looking for a picture book about a teddy bear named “Jacques” that falls out of a boat into the ocean along with some other stuffed animals (a white sheep?). He sees mermaids and an octopus squirts him with ink. He eats “fish fingers”. It’s most likely English and I had it when I was about 4 or 5 back in ’89 or there about. The book had very interesting full page illustrations.
It’s been bothering my sisters and me for decades!
College girl wants to be an actress but learns she doesn’t have the killer instinct. She earns $ by tutoring aspiring opera singer in Italian. She finds a p/t job tediously copying zoology charts by hand. She’s in a play; a rival actress puts sneezing powder in her handkerchief.
Thank you all for your interest in stump the bookseller as well as your patience. I am approximately a week and a half behind in posting and it can regularly take up to two weeks for your query to be posted. Thank you all again.
Ami
Little girl is a house-guest in her own family’s home. Children’s chapter book. Read in the 1960’s. Plot: a little girl wants to be a house-guest in her own family’s house – to sleep in the guest room and have special cookies made for her. Her parents go along with the little girl’s request. She packs a suitcase so that she can walk up to the door and be admitted as a guest. Also, the little girl has an aunt: The aunt does fun things when she visits, such as getting the whole town to play leap-frog. Many thanks!
Read in 80s, age 9-11. Young girl in a hotel for vacation & befriends monster living in lake who is very grumpy. They develop a deep friendship. Turns out he is an alien & fellow aliens come back to see if he’s learned to love. When they take him he cries a tear that turns into a clear stone for her
I am looking for a book with children’s stories. I don’t know the title. When my grandmother was a child, around 1910, one of her teachers gave her a book and my grandmother was given the task to recite one of the stories. The story was about 2 sisters on a dock and one of the sisters failed to save her sister when she fell into the swirling waters. I didn’t see the book, but grandmother provided the above information before she died. Thirty years later I saw the story in a museum in an open book that was locked under a glass counter. There wasn’t anyone manning the counter and I wasn’t able to inquire about it to get the name of the book. The book wasn’t large, perhaps 40-50 pages thick and perhaps it had a black cover. My sister thinks the name of one of the girls was Maggie. I would love to purchase this book if anyone knows of it.
There’s a girl and she’s tired of going to school and doing chores. She sees an ad in a magazine for an institute that can solve her problem by providing a copy of her that will do all the things she hates. She contacts them and they make her clone. Everyday they switch places and she goes to the institute where she can do what she wants while the clone lives her life. Then one day she decides she wants to go back to her life. She sneaks out the institute and she goes home where she sees the clone interacting with her parents. She tells the clone she’s done with her but the clone says they like me better. Then she realizes there’s a switch to turn her off on the back of her neck — and she realizes her best friend has the same switch.