Category Archives: MG (grades 2-6)

353N: California Transplant Helps Keep Oranges from Freezing (Solved!)

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Looking for a book from my preteen years. It was about a girl who moves to California. She lives with people who are not her family or maybe distant family or family friends. They run an orange orchard. They have to go out in the cold nights to light smudge pots to keep the fruit from freezing. (And I think at some point, it is a big deal for her to acquire a yellow raincoat that they call a ‘slicker’ in the book.)

353M: Circus Boy Rescues Chinese Girl, Witch Heals Her Bound Feet

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Looking for a children's fantasy novel about a poor boy working at a circus who rescues a Chinese girl with bound feet who's a prisoner in one of the attractions. Takes place in medieval Europe, I think. They're on the run and get rescued by a witch or an old woman who heals the girl's feet by breaking the bones and then teaches her how to walk again. The boy and the girl go on a quest together. There may be a dragon involved. Wasn't a picture book and it had chapters. Read it between 2002 and 2008, but was probably published way earlier. Wish I had more info, thanks!

353L: Victorian house with dog and dumbwaiter

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Dog lives in a mysterious old Victorian style house that has a dumbwaiter, possibly has puppies to care for, and the book is for young adults, may be a chapter book with several illustrations. Art style and spirals on the ends of letters suggests mid 60s to mid 70s. I checked this book out from a library in San Diego around 1988.

353J: Historical Stories for Girls

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I loved a book as a child (would have been reading it in the early 1990s), an old fashioned one with a hard cover bound in blue linen and fairly thick. I think there might have been a bird cage with a bird in it on the spine. It also would have had a different slip cover when it was new. I think it was called something like ‘Book for Girls’ or ‘Stories/Tales for Girls’

It was aimed at older girls, and had a variety of short historical stories in it, with female protagonists. It was interspersed with full page black and white ink illustrations, but not many, maybe one or two for each short story.

I think there was an Ursula Le Guin story in it, but I could also be confusing that with other books.

I know for certain that there was a story about a woman whose castle was under siege and the people in it are starving. There was also a historical love story where a man jumped over a women’s wall and starts to court her, even though she is married. She almost runs away with him, but he is actually a criminal so she stays with her husband, who brings her roses he picked himself, even though he was cut by the thorns. There was also a Chinese love story that was a ghost story, where the love between two young people is forbidden by her family. In the end maybe one turns into a swan? Or they both die?

Any help really appreciated, I have been trying to find this book for 7 years!

353C: 1970s, Younger Female Teen Figure Skater, Moves with Family to Rural Part of State, Practices on Perfect Pond next to Burned-Down Mill (Solved!)

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I read this novel in the 1970s when I was in early-mid elementary school. The main character and her family live in a state in the upper Midwest; she’s wicked into competitive figure skating and has been training/competing for years. Because of her dad’s job (he might be a college professor), they move from a city to a more rural part of the state where there are no indoor skating facilities and no training. She checks out the lake where the other kids skate, but finds it unsatisfactory (perhaps the surface is always bumpy). She finds a perfect pond! Ice is always clear of snow and smooth. But the locals shun it. She’s happy to train there alone. Eventually, she learns the reason why the spot is shunned by locals. It was a tragedy. The family that owned the mill was holding a party there for their daughter (about the same age as the novel’s main character), there was a fire, and the girl was killed.

352W: Late 50’s early 60’s space fiction

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Late 50’s early 60’s space fiction about a boy on a planet (possibly mars) with his pet.  The boy needs to get to different city/friends home.  Walks via an old highway but the temperature dips extremely, causing the boy to find refuge in a giant cabbage like plant that closes at night, saving him.

Read this from the 5th grade 1961/62 Ellis Elementary School library in Sunnyvale California.

352I: Boy Performs Appendectomy in the Deep Woods

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I’m looking for a book I read in the late 70’s or early 80’s, about a boy who was deep in the woods with a man, maybe a relative, for an extended period of time. It may be a Canadian book. The man develops appendicitis, and instructs the boy how to cut out his appendix, to save his life. The boy does it, and it works. The boy must be at least 10 years old, he may have been a young teen, I’m not sure.

352F: The Nonsense Book

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The book I am looking for, a book I read at my elementary school library quite often, is a children’s book, maybe aimed at the 9-12 year old set. I suspect from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s. It was a book of self-proclaimed nonsense, with riddles and jokes and poems and shaggy dog stories, with surrealistic drawings and text. The sense of humor was counter-cultural and a bit Monty Pythonesque. I seem to recall that it had the “As I was going to St Ives” riddle in it.

It was a larger format book, 8.5”x11” or larger, and around 80 pages. I think the cover was a brownish green. The drawing style was in a similar borderline grotesque line-art mode as the illustrations for Shel Silverstein or Roald Dahl books, but with a significant amount of clip art and a throwback-y quality to it. I think the title itself had the word nonsense in it, or a word with a similar meaning.

I’ve been racking my brains trying to recall more about it, but that’s all I can seem to manage.

352D: Girl in the 40s or 50s Who Can’t Draw Wants Her Teacher to Hang Her Picture In Front of Class

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I’m looking for a chapter book I read probably in the mid to late 1980s. My guess is that it was published in that time frame. It was set in the 1940s or 1950s and was about a school-aged girl. The main plot point I remember is that every week her teacher put one of her students’ paintings on display at the front of the class. The girl wished that her picture would be chosen, but she was not much of an artist. She finally convinced her father to draw a picture of a child ice-skating for her, and she colored it with watercolors. Her teacher selected this drawing, but not because of the drawing of the ice skater. She was drawn to the girl’s use of color and the many shades of blue she used, which was how the sky really looked, rather than just one single shade.

I also remember that a ballpoint pen was a plot point in this book — the girl really wanted a ballpoint pen, which was new and cool, but I think the ink may have kept clumping up and she had to warm it up on the radiator. (Or maybe that’s what was happening with her fountain pen, and that’s why she wanted a ballpoint pen.) I also remember the name Molly, but I could be mixing it up with the American Girl doll from the same era.