Hello…I am remembering a book I likely read in 5th or 6th grade about a girl who loved to enter contests. It was sort of an obsession for her…but the contests required skill, like writing a jingle or advertising copy. The one snippet I sort of recall had the words “sweets” “treats” and “table” in it…and possibly a brand name like SWISHERS. Help?!??!
I am looking for a book for a friend. She describes it as a young boy (possibly a “monster”) goes home for from boarding school for Christmas on a train and discovers the house a secret passage in the back of a closet. There is a map in the back of the book with the secret passageways. She think it came out in the early 90s and was a scholastic title. The family was wealthy. The book was intended for children 9-12. Help!?
I’m trying to recall the title of a children’s book which told the story of Thambi in a rural village in India trying to earn enough money for something he wanted by bringing a “Merican” (American) lady local flowers to paint. She asked him to find what were orchids, but possibly not called orchids, and one of the older village men told him to look in the trees in the forrests that lined the slopes of a local mountain called “the bearded one.” He found the orchids, brought them to the lady for painting, earned his money but bought a blanket for his family rather than what he wanted. The shop keeper saw what he had done and promised that the book or whatever it was he wanted would be there when he had earned some more money.
Can anyone remember this book?
Note: It has been identified as ‘Pinneyo Rama?’ (What then, Raman?) by Shirley L Arora, published in 1961.
I am looking for a children’s book that I read when I was in grade 3 in 1955 in Toronto. C. 1953? American? It was a small short picture book/easy reader chapters 5.5″x5.5″, black and white illustrations and hardcover.
In the attic, in a trunk there is a doll (old) who wishes that a little girl will find her and play with her. Emily? is playing one day and wanders up to the attic of her house and discovers a small trunk. I can still feel the hope and excitement of the doll (Henrietta?). Emily opens the trunk to reveal a beautiful doll with a complete wardrobe of clothes and a parasol.
Thank you so much for searching for this book for me.
p.s. I named my daughter Emily after the little girl in this book!
It is middle school aged, maybe 5th and 6th grade, and very much like a Beverly Cleary book, and it was in the mid to late 60’s that I read it. You flipped it upside down to read the alternate ending, which had a different cover. I loved it back then because it showed that bullies and the bullied are not so much different. The boy had a major challenge…to play in a school concert, it was either a bugle or a trumpet, and that was the end of both versions of the story.
I’ve looked all over and it seems not to be Beverly Cleary. I know I read it about the same time I was reading Beezus and Ramona.
Family of four traveling in a trailer around the U.S. One place they visited was an Amish community. I read it in the late 1950’s. Geared towards preteens.
Robot family moves to a human town – this picture book may be a metaphor for racism. The book is about a family of make-shift robots (I’m not sure if they were actually robots, but they were made out of metal parts and somebody’s arm may have been a broom). The family has a mom, dad, children, and maybe a pet. They move to a new town and are very excited at first, but then their human neighbors and classmates are hesitant to befriend them because they are different. Eventually, people begin to appreciate their unique qualities, and they make friends and settle in. I think this picture book is relatively new – it was the favorite book of a girl that I babysat around 2005. I think it’s appropriate for kids age 6-10, but I also loved it. It was somewhat large and may have had a pale yellow cover, but I forget. I’d really appreciate any help in finding it!
My husband is always talking about a series of books he read as a boy (born 1957), probably from school or city library. He remembers them being called “Adventures in…” followed by some sort of science title. The protagonists were two boys, one or both pre-teens. They would travel with their father and have what I guess were all science adventures (there could have been others, like mathematics, but my husband remembers only the two that were science oriented). The two he always talks about are the chemistry book (perhaps Adventures in Chemistry?) where the boys went to a laboratory and made toothpaste (he remembers the younger boy tasting the toothpaste and liking it) and a book about model rockets (Adventures in Rocketry, perhaps?). The boys and their dad are driving to a deserted place where they can shoot off their rockets and are stopped by the police who see all the rockets and the rocket motors in the car and are upset; maybe the dad shows them a permit to shoot off rockets or something to let the police know they are no threat. It’s our 25th anniversary coming up and I’d love to dig up one of these books, but I’ve never found them searching online.
The book I am trying to find was one of my favorites in the mid 1980s – not sure when it was published. The entire book is illustrated in an interesting way – every page is sort of sepia/black and white. The plot: a boy who is invited over to his friend’s house for dinner, but when he arrives at her house, no one is home. He sits on her stoop feeling sure that the friend doesn’t like him anymore. Later, the friend and her mother come home, and the friend tells the boy an incredible story about why they were so delayed. She tells him they were stuck in a parade – and I seem to remember something about a truck spilling molasses or some other gooey substance all over the street at the parade. The boy thinks the friend is lying, but the next morning he realizes she was telling the truth because it’s in the newspaper. The girl’s name MIGHT be Emily and the boy’s name MIGHT be Horace (these names could be wrong).
My 4th grade teacher in 1958-59 read us a chapter-a-day in a children’s book about a group of kids trying to solve a mystery. While trailing a bunch of crooks, the smell of the kids’ mosquito spray (quinine) gave them away. Calpurnia was the housekeeper.