Category Archives: 1990s-

349R: Travelog about Mongolia and Siberia with a female shaman

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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.

349Q: The Four Elementals and the Earth Children Raised in World with Magic

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The book was a children’s/YA book published sometime between 2005 and 2012. It was meant to be a quartet. I know 2 came out and I was curious if it was ever finished.
It had two main characters, a boy on earth who was disabled because he born on a world with magic. And a girl who is from earth but was raised in the world with magic, she’s the only one who can’t use magic and is immune to it.
There are evil magicians who can travel between the worlds, but doing so damages the worlds. The two main characters can move back and forth together but it damages the worlds. They’re told the only solution is to seek help from each of four elementals, societies of magic creatures that, if all four can be convinced to help, can make a bridge between the worlds in a safe way. Both of the main characters have to go to their birth worlds or it’s bad for the fabric of the universe or something, and this can only be accomplished with their help. The bad guys use dark magic and want to hunt them down. The boy struggles to learn the magic of his birth world. The first book dealt with the water elementals and the second with the earth elementals, I think. I think the name of the magic world started with an F
There’s a scene where the girl is on earth for the first time while they’re on the run and they go to a McDonald’s and she experiences a soda for the first time. I think her name starts with a K (Kira?)and the boy’s might be Marcus.

349P: Forest Girl Falls in Love with City Boy

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I read this as a young adult (I was born in 1976). It was a beautiful novel about a girl who grew up in the forest with little / no interaction with the outside world. I remember she had a vivid imagination and maybe had a magical lake or bog she would visit. She meets someone from the “city” and they fall in love. I seem to remember he gave her gloves and she didn’t know what gloves were. I now have teenage daughters and would love to share this novel with them.
I’ve done a lot of searching with the words girl, lost, forest, tree but can’t seem to figure it out.

349K: Silver Bells

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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.

349I: Children’s ghost story U.K.

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It was a collection of horror stories for children I think and one of them was a lady with a burned or scarred face who possibly came out of a painting. She was called Rhoda or Roda or something like that. It had these simple ink illustrations and I remember that one.

It had another story where a boy (I think) was hiding and heard the ghosts of some body snatchers - it may have been a retelling of Burke and Hare.

I’m English if that helps and I think I would have read this sometime in the 90’s.

Sorry, that’s so vague but those are the two that I think I remember.

348W: Who Kidnapped Toddler? (Solved!)

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British psychological thriller, probably 2019. Small child disappears from yard while young mother carelessly supervises her playtime.  Meanwhile, a married woman is in  a relationship which begins to reveal itself as rather strange and secretive. Her evasive husband becomes a suspect when coworker points finger in his direction, but his alibi is that his delivery route is far from the kidnapping site. Clues and suspicions build until his wife can no longer avoid suspecting his cagey behavior and question his guilt.

348O: Book with a page that is a dream about nose turning into a pickle w/ illustration (Solved!)

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It is a kids book from the 1990s, possibly got it through Scholastic book fair. The book is a disjointed collection of chapters or stories that are all related to night time, getting ready for bed, dreaming. The page and the only part of the story I remember most vividly is about having a dream that her nose turns into a pickle and she breaks it off and eats it, and on the page is an illustration of a kid with a big pickle nose.

Book was hard cover, dark blue, about the same size and length as Graeme Base’s “Animalia”.

The title itself is not about the pickle nose dream, and possibly is a little generic and so it is hard to search for, because the page I can remember and the title are likely unrelated (i.e. pickle is not in the title of the book) but the illustration of the kid with the big pickle nose is etched into my brain.
The illustrations were very beautiful, almost surreal, a little bit like Chris Van Allsberg but less realistic and more cartoon-ish, almost cubist. I remember one page had an illustration of a lone house at night time and all the windows are illuminated and it was very beautiful.
This is a long shot, but in searching on reddit I actually found other people who are trying to figure out what this book was called!

348N: Fern of the Forest?

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I’m trying to find a picture book from the 90s about a girl who lives in a town where they only make dog houses. She runs away to the forest because she doesn’t want to make dog houses, and she builds an amazing tree house with the help of the forest animals. For some reason I remember the title as “Fern of the Forest” but that might be completely wrong.

348M: Kids Timer Afterlife House Purgatory

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I read this book maybe around 2010, and it follows a duo of kids – I think they were brother and sister. At the start of the story there was some accident like a plane crash or something and then they are like taken to a different world. They are taken to a super awesome house, were they can get whatever they want, though at some point they realize a man who had a box with a timer on it like dies or something when it expires. This causes them to panic and travel to a purgatory type place where people go so their time stops. While they are there, time seems to like pass weird and without realizing it, 2 weeks pass and they are still there. The whole place is known to give off like bad energy so its just fill of miserable people moping around not doing anything – too afraid their timers will expire. There was one specific part I remember and that was the girl talking about how one of the girls was eating a sandwich with mustard, and I just always thought it was gross the way it was talked about.