Author Archives: admin

132A: Girl being stirred in a pot (solved)

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Bought this around 1986 (6th grade book fair!) and cannot remember the title or main character names. Loved the story though, and hope I can find it for my daughter.

The hardback cover was green, and the picture was of three girls singing and stirring a fourth girl in a pot.

The story was of a girl in her early teens at summer camp. She ends up feeling saddled with another girl who is strange and a little disgusting – the weird girl borrows a barrette from the main character and uses it to clean her toenails.

There is a talent show (depicted in the cover art), and the weird girl is the one in the pot.

The main character ends up tossing the weird girl out of a canoe, and leaves her bobbing in the lake. She tries to make up with her before they leave camp, but the weird girl yells at her in the cafeteria.

The main character goes home regretting what she did, and tries to think of some way to make amends.

 

131D: book on city underground

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This is a picture book on what lies underneath a large metropolitan city, shown in cross-sectional drawings. I found this at a bookstore about four years ago, but it was a reproduction of a book originally published in the 1920’s or 30’s. All the cars on the street level were period automobiles with big scoop headlamps, like Packards and Pierce Arrows. All the illustrations were in color. Even though it is a contemporary publication, no bookseller I’ve talked to has a clue what I’m talking about. (And it’s not David Macaulay.)

 

131B: Military School Sci-Fi Fantasy (SOLVED)

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I am looking for a YA sci-fi/fantasy book I read when I was a kid. I believe it came out in hardcover in the US in or around 1988. It was about 12 boys sent to a military/reform school, I think the school was called Kah Nagallah or something like that. I seem to remember that the story was told from the POV of a boy who was being sent to the school with his adopted brother, who was autistic. The faculty secretly trained the boys to go on a mission to a subterranean kingdom to retrieve a powerful object, I think it was called the Vroon. The boys started calling themselves ‘the Coyotes’ and their symbol was a nautilus shell with an arrow through it. The boys escape the control of the faculty and recover the Vroon for themselves and use it for good.
The book was long, over 300 pages I think. It had some b&w illustrations. The cover art was a drawing of the boys riding in a tracked vehicle with a dome through a cavern.

 

131A: little gnome who scents the flowers

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1960’s/1970’s storybook- This was a short, very colorful story within a book of many stories. It was about a gnome/ old bearded man who scented and colored the flowers. One day he was carrying his glass bottles filled with his potions and they fell into the stream. Some fish tried to help him and there was a young girl/ fairy type character who was with him. Her named could have been Melinda or Belinda. There also may have been a part to the story about some matches getting wet.. It was written in a comic book strip style ( at least that is what my mother recalls.) I feel like the book was red and white and don’t remember the other stories.

 

130B: Stumpy ballerina girls (Solved!)

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Kids picture book (large size at least 8×10″) for little girls, about a group of girls, about 4-8 of them, and they are very short and stumpy (e.g. thick legs) with big heads. They are sweet and passive. They do girly things, including ballet. Or maybe ballet through the whole book. At one part of the book they might get sleepy and take a nap under a tree. At one part there might be a group of boys who antagonize them. I read it during my childhood approx 1984-1992, so it can’t be newer than that and it is likely not much older.

Another way to describe the girls: they look human but they have doll-like proportions. Maybe they are dolls?

Update:

“The Little Girls’ Dance Class” by J. Carruth (1984).
I was able to find it through https://www.worldcat.org/ using the search criteria (year 1975-1993, juvenile, fiction, book). At first I tried searching all the “Ballerinas”, no luck. “Ballet”, no luck. I was going to do “dance” next (a lot of searches) but something all of a sudden told me to try “dance class” was something in the title so I searched that and found it! Wow, I was almost in tears when I saw the photo of the cover. I bought myself a copy online. I submitted the request on this site over 7.25 years ago, and thought of it many times since then. I never actually came back to check the site to see if there were any replies until today, and I was really disappointed there weren’t any, so that’s why I searched again on my own. The other reason I keep being reminded of this book over the years… so there’s this interesting physical/emotional feeling I get, maybe a couple times a year, it feels like my legs are stumpy/stubby like the girls’ legs in the book. Like I feel like the girls in book.