I am trying desperately to find a beloved book from my childhood. I do not remember the name, but I do remember a few details.
I am looking for the specific edition of a book I read repeatedly as a child. It was a Cicely Mary Barker book, pretty sure it was Flower Fairies of the Garden. It was a small book, with a mostly white cover. I’m not sure the cover illustration. It had to have been published before 1992. It might have been part of a set. The first poem in the book was The Forget-me-not Fairy that begins something like “Where do fairy babies lie/til they’re old enough to fly/here’s a likely place I think/midst these flowers blue and pink”. Other fairies in this edition included Scilla, Geranium, and Sweet Pea. I have purchased at least five different printings of this book, and none has included the forget-me-not fairy. Can you help?
The story is of a wealthy little boy who seems to be without parents. There is a butler. He receives a gift of an exotic bird (parrot/macaw/toucan?) who injures his beak and the boy fixes it with a bar of soap. A heavy-set woman visits who I believe is an opera singer. The illustrations are pen and ink with some color, but my overwhelming memory of the book is that it is basically in black, white and red. All the characters, as I remember have large ovoid heads and small bodies.
I bought this book for my son in the early 2000s.
The shaman woman told the author was identified as a shaman when a child because she did everything backwards, sleeping all day and staying awake all night. The author visited her in her remote tent in deep forest. Another girl they met was pleased to have won a prize for her poem about pine needles being her pillow and the forest stream being her wine. I think her poem started with “I am a girl of the Tuva”. It may have been about living in the Taiga? I think it was written in the 1990s. I read it in the first decade of the 1990s. I borrowed it from Plymouth Library in England.
This is a children's book from the 1970s about a very bad little cat who lives with his mother, who throws his alarm clock out the apartment window and damages someone's car. His mother says "Another nail in my coffin" as he is constantly getting into trouble. I think he becomes a good cat by the end.
All I remember about this book is that a group of kids (who were maybe related. There were two brothers?) ended up in this absolutely empty valley - there was a plane involved. And they explore this valley - find a cave to live in. And at some point they solve a mystery - a chicken is involved - and they find gold. And then get rescued. This was is the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew genre. All I remember about the cover is that it had a numeral of sorts on it. Also, in another book in the same series one of the brothers finds a rare bird - a great auk or something.
In the early 1960s we had a picture book that was probably published in the 1950s. It was about a man and boy walking through the woods, possibly in Canada. The man was likely a lumberjack.
My sister and I remember reading a book in the 90s that was word for word the lyrics to silver bells. It had photos that matched the lyrics – I remember the city sidewalks / busy sidewalks dressed in holiday style page was a snowy city street, darker outside, I believe with wreaths and other Christmas decor around town. I believe the whole song was printed out on the last page. It was a larger book, maybe 12” x 6” in size. Darker cover, hardback.