Category Archives: 1990s-

332D: Dark Fairy Tale

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I have been looking for years for a YA book I read years ago, and I am hoping you can help. This is what I remember – which could be wrong:
  • Young adult fiction
  • Part of a series
  • Dark retelling of classic fairy tales
  • Checked out from my local library between 1999-2008
  • Around the same time I read “Just Ella” by Margaret Peterson Haddix, and this would have been around the same time period and genre. This could even be written by her as well.
The book is set in a fairy-tale land, or ‘medieval’ era. The main character is a young girl who is a witch, or just finds out she is a witch, or is learning to be a witch. The girl becomes the town witch/medicine lady who people come to for medicinal needs. There is a distinct part in the book where someone comes to her with their baby who was born with either six fingers or six toes- and they want it removed, but through magic. The witch knows she can cure it without magic, but she needed to put on some sort of a show, so she draws the circle and summons the demons, but she ends up just biting off the baby’s finger/toe herself and pretending it was the demon. She is found out, the demons demand payment, and she is in big trouble.
Essentially, this is a dark retelling of a fairy tale but I could not tell you which princess she was supposed to be.
I’d love to find this book again!

331V: Trailer History (Solved!)

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I’d judge this to be from the 1990’s.  It’s a very fun and funny history of trailers (some mention of manufactured houses and tiny homes, but Trailers).  Partial-color photograph on front shows an elderly woman planting flowers in her repurposed commode, no a flowerpot, in front of her trailer.  The epilogue is, for a reason I’ve forgotten, the story of someone who watched a wolf take a piece of wool between his teeth and back slowly into a lack and submerge himself; the observer figuring the wolf knew his fleas would move to the ball of fuzz (I think lanolin was mentioned).

It is quite a read.  The public library has no memory of it, even in records.  Online there is nothing at all resembling it.  Please help!

331O: Scary Stories, Author Visited Louisville KY Around Turn Of Millennium

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I remember my family reading a collection of scary stories in our backyard around a fire. The author, a woman, visited our city (outside of Louisville, KY) to do a book reading around this time, and that’s how we discovered her book. This would have been anywhere between 1998-2003-ish. I remember very little about the plot to the individual stories, unfortunately — perhaps one about involved a tree and ribbons? It’s very possible that memory of the plot is just mushing other scary stories together… I’ve tried searching newspaper archives to see if there’s coverage of her book-signing, but so far no luck.

331G: Paranormal Handbook For Kids

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I am looking for a book that I read when I was about 7. It was probably published in the late 80s to early 90s and was basically a paranormal handbook geared towards kids. I would check it out from the juvenile section of my local library and it featured directions for basic ghost hunting and how to test ESP. It featured Shel Silverstein-like illustrations of kids doing the experiments (you know, that line art style that was so popular in the 80s). It may have had any (or none! how exciting!) of the following words in the title: paranormal, extrasensory perception, ghosts.

330Z: Toy Horse Comes To Life

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It’s a children’s book, I think middle grade level?  Not sure though, but I don’t remember it having pictures.  A girl wants a horse for her birthday, but her parents get her a model horse instead.  Girl is disappointed (I would be too!).  She climbs a tree with the model and puts it on a branch, but is mad at it and flicks it down to the ground.  It comes to life (full sized) and talks.  She rides it around.  I don’t remember how it ends.  I probably read it in the early 90’s.

330Y: World Girl History Series, Including Dolls (Solved!)

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I’m looking for an early-to-mid-90s “American Girl”-style series of short illustrated chapter books about girls living in different periods of world history, each with their own 18-inch doll.

I am definitively NOT remembering Pleasant Company’s own “Girls of Many Lands” series. Believe me, that comes up every time I try to Google this series and it’s not the one I’m thinking of.

The line may have launched with one book for each doll, then gone out of business before publishing more books; I only remember the first book for each character, most likely obtained through the Scholastic Book Fair.

The characters and books were, as well as I can recall:
– An English girl in the 1100s who was into falconry. Name may have been Elinor/Eleanor. Vivid recollection of the cover: a blond girl in a dull blue dress reaching out to touch a falcon.
– An African (I want to say Igbo?) girl from the 1400s. Vivid recollection of her helping her older sister put on makeup before her wedding, including interior illustration of her applying the makeup. (I remember being surprised that they had makeup way back then. For some reason, that’s what stuck with me.)
– A French girl in the 1700s who wanted to be a ballet dancer. Name may have been Marie, or Marie-Something, or Something-Marie. Cover showed her dancing on a Parisian street.
– An Irish immigrant girl living in San Francisco in the late 1800s. Name may have been Bridget or some other extremely Irish name. Cover may have featured her holding a book to her chest and gazing meaningfully off into the distance. She had curly red hair because of course she did. I believe she also had a Chinese immigrant friend or potential friend who barely showed up and whom I hoped I’d read more about in later books. Vivid recollection of one scene in which she and another girl bond over how much they loved “Little Women” and cried over “the part with Beth.”

There may have been more; those are just the four I remember. On the last page of each book was a perforated card with a photograph of the dolls on it. You could tear out the card and send it away with a check to order a doll. They looked very much like American Girl dolls, so much that even as a child I could tell right away, “Oh, these people are totally ripping off American Girl.” But I could forgive them because hey, history’s a lot bigger than just America! Someone’s gotta fill that niche!

Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you!

330J: Interactive red/yellow circle piece board book

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This is a children’s board book.  I believe the pages are all white with black font writing.  This is an interactive pull tab book where, to start, you drop an actual red and yellow sided counter disc into the book.  Each page changes the color of the disc going from red to yellow.  I am not sure if the red/yellow color is necessary as perhaps other color counters may have been used?  It may have been about shapes.  I suspect it may have been a 1980’s or 1990’s book.  You can pull tabs, slide, flip and open pages to reveal the counter.  It was my son’s favorite book for years.  We cannot find it and he mentioned it to me the other day.  I would like to find it for his 14th birthday if I can.  Thank you.