Hi. I’m looking for a book from the late 1960’s – early 1970’s, and I haven’t had any luck at the sites you recommend because I have so little to go on.

A little girl is excited about her class trip to a pumpkin patch where every child gets to choose and take home a pumpkin. When she finds her perfect pumpkin, she discovers a mouse living inside it. She decides to leave her perfect pumpkin so the mouse can stay and goes home empty-handed.

Thanks.

PS I grew up right by Shaker Square. Next time I come home I will visit your store!

This book was a children’s book about a bunch of tiny people.  They lived on or around a river, and led a very scary life.  Someone – maybe a full size person, or a rival group of miniature people, was quite willing to kill them.  And hung dead animals up on trees to scare them away from wherever it was that they wanted to go.

I don’t know how it ended – as a child I only got through the first two thirds one night when my family was visiting another family, and there were no other kids present so I picked up something to read instead.  This would have been 1971/1972 in Africa, Lesotho or Swaziland.  So the book would most likely have been British in origin.  It was kind of dreadful and frightening for a kids’ book, but I have always been curious about how it ended!