A young boy becomes a roach- literally all I remember. However, the side story I do remember. His sister is some kind of super genius who didn’t speak until she was five and when she did finally speak she created a board game. She spends her day in front of the tv counting the number of times the commercial for the board game plays and how much money she is making.
Read this in January 1995. It is a Judy Blume or Louis Sachar-esque children’s chapter book. Some kids are doing some kind of report and/or competition to create outlandish dishes by new and inventive means.
The protagonist, a boy, decides to experiment by putting insects in the food. In one scene, he brings brownies to school that he’s put roaches in. (Particularly memorable because it just so happened I brought brownies to class for my birthday that day when we got to that chapter and everyone got a big laugh about the coincidence). He finds out that his chief rival is using the car to cook food; they come out of church or a PTA meeting to the smell of hamburgers because he put the patties on the hot engine. Thanks!
In the world of this book, every time something happens, like a war, both outcomes come true. A new world is created with the alternate outcome. So there are many earths. The one that this one takes place on is not ours. In this Earth, America is called Atlantis.
The children survive the shipwreck because the boy is a witch and the sister hangs onto him. But you don’t find that out till the end. You think – because she says so – that she is the witch and she saved him.
He is left-handed, which where they came from is punished but where they have arrived at, is celebrated as it is a sign of being a witch. That’s all I remember….
I probably read it in the late seventies, possibly early 80’s. I was probably around 12 – it was a middle-year chapter book. It was really good.
I hope it sounds familiar to someone! Thanks for your help!
Dark fantasy middle school/ya novel from late 90s about girl who goes into forest to find brother who was lured in there by mysterious/sinister teenage boy. Other creepy children also live in the forest and heroine encounters many supernatural things on her journey to find her brother. Book cover had screaming face stuck in a wall.
Girl 11-14 who has ESP (as does her clan), has to do something or loses it and dies, meets boy (older) from moon or sky city who has no powers, but lots of technology that does same thing. They hook up (which I thought was odd for that age), and their two civilizations meet or something like that. 60-70’s I think. Telepathy was part of it.
I’ve been trying to remember the details on this one for years, and can’t pull enough out to find it.
It’s a young adult book I read several times growing up, always taking it out of the library. It was stocked in the first shelf of the Young Adult section, which means the author was somewhere between A and maybe N, I think.
The cover had, in the top left corner, a boy standing on the edge of the school roof, with wings or a parachute or contraption of some kind. Down below were two boys looking up at him, possibly waving their arms or shouting at him not to jump.
The boy on the school roof wasn’t one of the main characters, though, just an oddball who was part of the local color of the school. The main character had just arrived at a very odd boarding(?) school, where many of the kids were quirky. I believe he found someone kind of normal already there to take him under his wing.
That’s all I remember.
Early- to mid-1970’s: A boy builds robots in a non-urban area. A lightning strike makes them autonomous. At the end of the book, he tells them to “stop rowing for a minute. ” They take the instruction literally and, 60 seconds later, row away, never to be seen again. IIRC the book had some insignia on its paperback cover saying that it had won some sort of literary award.
A story about a teen or pre-teen girl from who lives in purdah (in India, I believe) who is being prepared for marriage. She gets pierced (ears and nose I think) and undergoes other ceremonies that are apparently traditional for a girl her age. She belongs to a well-off family, and her father has been indulgent and somewhat spoiled her up to this point, but now a young man has been selected for her, and she is expected to assume adult responsibilities and accept this inevitable fate maturely. I think an older female relative (aunt, or grandmother) attempts to soothe her anxieties by breaking tradition and allowing her to meet the young man–chaperoned, of course–before the ceremony. I seem to recall the book is rather open-ended, leaving the reader with a slightly optimistic feeling that the main character may face a happy future with her prospective spouse, despite her reluctance for the whole thing. I have a vague feeling that there were some tiger cubs were involved somehow in the story (maybe one of the outrageous gifts her father had given her?) I can’t remember the title, but I think it had the word “Time” in it, and the girl’s name, which for some reason nags at me as having started with the letter “Y”.
This was a series of books that I read between 1975 and 1981 (I think). Each book featured 20 or so stories (2-6 pages long) of a super sleuth who solved a mystery, that invited you to figure out how he solved it. Answers were in the back of the book. The lead detective was a “Dr.” and he had a sidekick who narrated, and were set in England.
Thank You!
A girl lives in an old house. Her mother is a servant there. The old nursery closet has measurements for growth from the children who used to live there. The girls can travel back in time to play with the children. She gets injured and stops growing in the past time. She also solves a mystery of a lost and valuable book hidden in a tree trunk.