Category Archives: MG (grades 2-6)

191D: traveling poet who sells his rhymes (Solved)

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The book is about a traveling poet who sells his rhymes. He meets a king or ruler of a town who wants everything to be the biggest and the best. So king is building a hill bigger than any hill, but the hill collapses every day. The colors on the book were very muted so I think it was pre-1980s. I think a part of the book was “the sun is a sun a star is a star i am who i am you are who you are” and something about walking on his feet and following his nose. I would be forever grateful if you could find the name of this children’s book!

191C: Dirty Little Pig ?

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This book was probably published between 1942-1965. It was about a family that lived near train tracks so that the soot covered everything in the house, including the family. The doctor was sent for and I remember he looked everything over and said, “Hmmmmm” which I thought was funny as a small child. The illustration I remember was of a pig sleeping in an open dresser drawer. I seem to recall the illustrations were not in color but more like sketches. I have searched for this book for 10+ years. Nobody has ever heard of it.
Also, if this helps, my mother belonged to something called the Junior Literary Guild and many of my books as a child were JLG books. Maybe this one was as well. My older siblings thought the book was called The Dirty Family or the Dirty Little Pig or that “dirty” was a part of the title.

191A: Orphans living with elderly relative, doorknobs made of diamonds

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A childrens book written before 1968 involving orphans living with elderly relative. all are poor. female child falls asleep in a turret room and is transported to a magical world where she and other children help the creatures in some kind of war. Upon return the doorknobs in the house are discovered to be real diamonds. There is a bad child that ends up in a gazing ball in the garden. I have been trying to remember the title and or author of this book for years. I loved it as a child and want very much to get a copy for my grandchildren.

190D: Girl Moves in to a Family Full of Boys (Solved)

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I am searching for a book I read when I was a teenager, so it would have been in the 1960’s or 1970’s. I cannot remember the name, and the details are a bit foggy. But, it was about a girl whose parents died or were gone or something like that. She was living with a family that had a number of boys. She fell in love with one of the boys, and another of the boys hated her. She was trapped in a cellar, and almost died, but did recover. The boy she was in love with died, and the boy who hated her eventually fell in love with her. I wish I could remember more! I hope you can identify this book for me!

190C: Girl starts Babysitting to Buy Christmas Presents (Solves)

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I’m looking for a book I enjoyed as a child around 1995, although I believe it was published well before then, probably around the 50s. It is about a girl who starts her own babysitting business because she wants to buy Christmas presents for her family. It details her escapes with the children along the way…she eventually gets her mother a set of orange (or maybe apricot?) scented bath products…bubble bath etc. Can you help with this? I’d so love to have this book for the holidays.

189A: Princess, a rose, sheet music in the book (solved)

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I’m looking for a slim paperback, probably from the late 1970s early 1980s, possibly from one of the Scholastic book fairs. It was about a princess, I think secluded in some castle, and I recall it being a romance. A rose featured prominently in the story, and the most specific part of the book that I recall was that there was a song included in the back of the book, in sheet music for the piano, that was about the rose. I remember trying to play the song on the piano as a child…I believe that there were only a few illustrations, and those were in pen / ink…not colored. Thanks for any help!

188G: Children’s book about a boy who learns about different secret codes from a mentor

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I believe I read this book in the sixth grade (which would have been late 1970s). I got it from the school library. I would guess it was written prior to the late 1970s because we never had any new books at the school library. In the book, the boy meets a man who teaches him about different kinds of codes and how to break them. It included info about how people used to wrap paper around a cylinder and then write messages on the spiraled paper (so the reader would need a cylinder of the same radius to read the message correctly). It also had a tic-tac-toe type code (Different squares of the tic tac toe shape would represent different letters so an A would look like a backwards L and a B would look like a U). It also talked about E, T, A, and O being the most common letters (in English) so when you are trying to decode a message, the more commonly used symbols probably stand for one of those letters.

188F: Kids on spaceship schoolbus accidentally knock it off course and end up on strange planet

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A kid/teenager’s book about three kids that are on a spaceship school bus that is taking them home (the last three kids furthest away from school) who mess with the autopilot and end up loosing control of the spaceship. It ends up at another planet altogether where there are people dressed in fur.
It might have been published in the 80s. It had images for each chapter.