Category Archives: MG (grades 2-6)

302Y: Strange “activity” book

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I’ve posted about this elsewhere, but there’s a strange book from my childhood that both my sister and I remember.  I say activity book, but it wasn’t really an activity book. There was no place to draw or anything in the book. Here are some details:

*It was probably published around 1980-1985, I would have read it from 1987-1991, and I believe it was my sister’s before I got it. It was about a 2nd to 5th grade reading level. Some pics, some text.

*The cover was a dark blue/teal, the title was a garish reddish color, and there was a knight on it

*I remember the title being kind of long, and ending with the words “…for kids!”

*The book was really non-sequitur, and went all over the place. One page might be a math puzzle, the next might be a story about baseball.

*There was a recurring theme of a medieval knight throughout the whole thing, and he would just pop up randomly to comment on stuff

*There were a lot of jokes about “the author/publisher of this book blah blah blah” and “the editors of this book blah blah blah.” Probably way over my head at the time.

*The last page was a memorization game

*I believe there was one page with a large blue square on it, and a paragraph talking about the significance of that square.

*There was at least one math word problem, and I believe it involved crickets or grasshoppers

*There was a story about baseball, maybe about the history of baseball?

*There was a brief page about lead in pencils, and how it’s called lead, but it’s really graphite

 

As for the style of the book, it’s almost as if a bunch of people with a similar sense of humor got together and decided to make a kids book, but not talk to each other about it. It was that bizarre. Almost every page was a different subject, and the only recurring motif at all was the random knight. The book constantly broke the fourth wall, and the writer(s) would make fun of the characters on that page, or the random knight would make fun of the author(s). Someone stated that it sounds like Monty Python, and it was a lot in that same vein of humor. If Monty Python made a kids book, it would be very similar to the one I’m looking for.

It’s entirely possible that it was written by a group of people, and possibly as a joke.

For what it’s worth, my grandmother lived in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina during my youth (the 1980’s). She had moved there from northern New Jersey in the late 1970s. She was a kindergarten teacher for most of her life.  Furthermore, her sister (my great-aunt) had actually published a few books (one of them a children’s book) during the 1960s, and lived in Washington DC until the mid 1980s. So there were strong ties in those places. The book could have been published by a small publisher in any of those places, and somehow made it’s way to my grandmother.

Again, thanks for your help!

302V: Travels through alternate universes and baseball

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Possibly a book, possibly a series – listened to as an audio book on a car trip in the early 2000’s. The book was from Cracker Barrel (which is apparently Ingram Entertainment titles, if that helps). The book followed three protagonists, a girl and two boys. They traveled to other worlds or alternate universes through tunnels. The other worlds usually had some sort of baseball theme. At least one had a society of gnomes who used it as their court procedures. The girl protagonist was a pitcher. The had a map that helped them find the way – depending on how it was folded, it could show a neighborhood, a city or even be a star map. The antagonists had eyes you could see through, all the way to what was on the other side of their heads – photographs of Manhattan Project scientists showed that many of them were bad guys due to this effect.

302P: Fiction, Pre U.S. Revolutionary War Saga

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This book probably was published before 1955 when I was in the fifth grade. It was the read-aloud after lunch by our teacher Miss Gambee. I met her again when I was an adult, but she didn’t remember its title. As I remember it, it begins with a boy sitting in his favorite oak tree trying to save it because the British navy has marked it for use as a mast. This scene sets up one of the many reasons for the eventual revolution of the colonies.

Another part of the saga deals with the moving of the French Canadians or Acadians, but I’m not sure how that fit in.

In another scene, a young lady is weaving wool for rebel uniforms when a wounded British soldier is brought to her house to recover. This part of the saga seemed to be trying to tell its readers that enemies are not always the villains we make them out to be.

I don’t remember the end of the book, but I’m fairly certain it took us through the revolution to its end, maybe to the formation of the new constitution, but I’m not sure. In Oregon, fifth graders study U.S. history up to the constitution, so this novel was a very good way of showing the reasons for the revolution and the turmoil of war. It was a lot more memorable than the text book. I hope you can find it. My daughter now teaches fifth grade and I would love to give it to her if it can be purchased.

302O: Chapter Book about Young Man and a Bicycle Race (Solved)

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My memory is of a chapter book that I checked out from an elementary school library in the late 60’s. It was about a young man participating in a bicycle race, perhaps the Tour de France, or modeled after that race. It was more advanced than a simple picture book, and my recollections are that the style of writing and illustrations could have been from the 50’s to early 60’s. The grueling race was seen through this young participant’s eyes, and I recall the descriptions being quite vivid. Again, my memory is that it was an upper-elementary or perhaps middle grade reading level. It was a realistic account of a long, multi-day bicycle race but was definitely a novel. Thanks for any help you can give.

301Y: This is not the Laura Ingalls Wilder story

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The book I am looking for is one I checked out from the Louisville free  public library in the 1960s.

The story  was about a family moving west in a covered wagon. (This is not the Laura Ingalls Wilder story)

The family faced hardships and trials. It was a children’s chapter book with an orange cover that I believe had a covered wagon on the cover.

I know chimney rock was mentioned as a landmark in the book. I have looked many times for this book and would like to read it again. In contrast to the little house books, it was a bit more graphic, mentioning things like animal skeletons and tombstones along the trail.

It was fascinating and dramatic. I know this is vague, but would truly appreciate if you could find it. It has been gone from LFPL for many, many years.

301S: Five O’Clock Charlie doesn’t seem right

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A YA book like Beautiful Joe but is the story of an abused horse. The horse’s name may be Charlie. Looked up Five o’ clock Charlie but it doesn’t seem right, seems too happy (is there anything about him being abused by a first owner?). I can’t give any more detail as I never read it. I want to buy it as a present for a friend who read it as a child, he’s in his mid 40s.

301C: A boy is dropped off at a “poor house”

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The book that I am looking for is as follows:
 
Set in the time of US slavery, this children’s story opens with a very young boy being anonymously dropped off a horse drawn wagon at a the end of the driveway of a rural ‘poor house’ in a northern US state.  It turns out that his slave mother was forced to leave him behind while fleeing her ‘owner’ and the father of her baby as she tried to reach Canada via the underground railroad.

The reader does not have this information at the start of the tale but rather learns this as the story unfolds.  The story follows the little boy who is taken in by the operators of the ‘poor house’, however unwillingly.  In return for lodging he is assigned chores and when old enough goes to school and makes friends.  His closest friend, however, is one of the other residents, a giant male adult with mental health issues that cause him to occasionally become violent, which necessitate that he be kept in a cage in the house so that he will not harm others.  Near the end of the story, this man (perhaps severely afflicted with severe SAD)  is killed in an accident in a rock quarry where he works when mentally able to do so.
 
The little boy is visited by a white man from the south, and eventually comes to understand that this man is not someone with good intentions, in fact he is his father.  He has been pursuing both he and his mother who had managed to escape. I forget all the details of the story, however, the boy does end up safely in Canada

300Y: Dramatic in a good way

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So I read this book when I was still in elementary school, no older than 12 years old, meaning this book couldn’t have been published after 2003. Sadly, I cannot recall anything about the title or author, only that the cover, if I remember correctly, featured a boy with a lady ghost on his left side, with black and white colors.

So the story is about a school class that somehow ends up lost in a forest during a bad storm, I believe they were all in a school bus for a trip but it crashed. As far as I recall, no one died, but everyone ended up being separated. The story is linear but there are a some flashbacks we get to see while the characters are lost in the woods.

Speaking of characters, these are the people I recall:

  1. A boy whose mother died and the text implies he can see ghosts, including the ghost of his mother; he might have been the protagonist, but I don’t think the book narrated from his point of view often, if at all.
  2. Another boy called Alvin (or at least I think it was Alvin, I distinctly remember being distracted by his name because I always thought of Alvin and the chipmunks, so it’s either that or Theodore or Simon) who was implied to be involved with some shady business people. He had a briefcase that he carried around, though we never get to know what the contents are. If I recall correctly, he owed money (or something else) to these said shady people, and two men in suits are after him and manage to find him while he’s lost in the woods.
  3. The suits, the two men (might have been more though, but I’m nearly certain it was two) that are going after Alvin. The impression I got is that they were trying to kill him.
  4. The class teacher, who was a woman.
  5. An unnamed boy and girl who were part of the class.
And these are the scenes that I remember involving said characters.
  1. The class teacher has a flashback while she’s lost about the boy who can see ghosts, she recalls poems that they wrote in class, and how reading the poem of this one kid worried the teacher because it either implied that he could see ghosts, or that he wanted to die following the death of his mother, or both.
  2. The unnamed boy and girl are ‘regular’ kids who were friends, might have been love interests too, and while lost they have a scene where they reunite and fiercely embrace each other under the rain, I remember thinking the description was very heavy with emotions, even a little dramatic (in a good way though).
  3. Towards the end of the book, Alvin is found by the two suits, and have him cornered under an old/abandoned tunnel. Either that or Alvin tricks them into thinking he went to the tunnel while he hid. Either way, the suits end up meeting with the boy who sees ghosts instead, threaten him, but the ghost of his mom appears and I believe it was implied the ghost got rid of the men, or at least that’s how I understood it.
  4. The next morning (I believe they were lost during nighttime) the whole class reunites, Alvin made it out safe; I remember a classmate asks about his briefcase he always carried around (cause he was so defensive about it) saying he was leaving it behind, but Alvin replies that he doesn’t need it anymore. I believe the text also implied that the boy who can see ghosts no longer can see his mother after the tunnel incident, but gets closure somehow as a result.
That’s all I can recall… I believe the book was illustrated too, with some pictures every chapter or so, but here’s the catch. I’m from Mexico, so I’m not certain if what I read was a book originally written in Spanish, or a book that was translated from English to Spanish. Given the Alvin name (not a common one in Spanish) I’m leaning towards it originally in English, but I’m not 100% sure.
I hope all this helps, this book has been haunting me for years and I just want to get closure somehow haha.

300X: The fertile farm bought with three moths (Solved)

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This is for my husband. He said he had a reader he loved as a kid. It was published by Scholastic. He said it is about a family who loses everything. The father, mother and at least two kids get in their car and head out. They end up buying a farm which is not fertile because they were taken advantage off. However, the farm is kind of magical and becomes fertile. The farmer who sold it to them comes back at toward the end of the book and wants it back. He says that the father of the family had said he would buy the farm with everything in his wallet and that he did not hold his end of the bargain because there were three moths in his wallet he did not give away. The farmer proceeds to plant trees which grow immediately and turn the day to night because of the shade of their canopies. The family goes hunting for moths with a flashlight and find three moths to pay the bad man with.