Category Archives: MG (grades 2-6)

140A: Childrens book with an animal (bunny or mouse) that wins the lottery (solved)

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I have been searching for a book that I read in first grade, and I can not find it to save my life.

The book is about a rabbit or possibly a mouse. He works in a grocery store, and wins the lottery. He wastes the money he wins on a car with no engine, a mansion that is too big for him, and a motorcycle so that he can move back and forth through the mansion.

The book ends with the mouse or bunny broke, and returning to work at the grocery store. he buys another lottery ticket on the last page i think.

I was in the first grade in 1988-89, so my memory may not be that great of the details. I think this was a scholastic book- we had book fairs and mailers come home all the time, and that might have been how I ended up with this book.

 I have a first grader that is starting chapter books, and I would love to give him this book. I have very fond memories of reading and laughing at how silly it was. Your help is much appreciated.

 

137D: Boy Flees Village (Solved)

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In 1973 I read an old hardcover book containing European children’s stories.  The stories were probably written in the early 1900s.  In one story a boy is working for a man in a village and unknowingly helps the man rob a house; the man uses a ladder to enter the second story of the house.  Someone pulls up the driveway and they flee.  Days later the boy returns to the village, is forgiven, and continues to be friends with the girl who lives in the house.  He tells her how he fled through the woods and fields for days.  He tells her that when he was fleeing, he met the man again by a lake, and the man said to keep running.  There is no magic involved in this short work; it is not a fantasy.  The story was written for ten to twelve year old readers.

 

133G: The Blue Chest

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I am looking for a children’s book written between 1940 and 1965, for ages 10-12 years old. It is the story of a family that moves from a house to an apartment, I believe in New York City, and the children find a hidden room in the apartment behind a blue or pink chest. It may had a few illustrations in it. Also, the mother sews their clothes and makes matching outfits for the boy and girl. I read this book just when I moved to a new school, in 1967, and really hope to find it!

132B: Boy looses marble on family sailboat, finds it as an adult when same boat washes ashore

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This was an illustrated children’s book I had as a child in the mid sixties about a young boy who goes sailing with his father and looses his favorite marble in the cabin below.  Years later as a young man, and with a child of his own, he discovers a shipwreck and finds his marble then restores boat

 

132A: Girl being stirred in a pot (solved)

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Bought this around 1986 (6th grade book fair!) and cannot remember the title or main character names. Loved the story though, and hope I can find it for my daughter.

The hardback cover was green, and the picture was of three girls singing and stirring a fourth girl in a pot.

The story was of a girl in her early teens at summer camp. She ends up feeling saddled with another girl who is strange and a little disgusting – the weird girl borrows a barrette from the main character and uses it to clean her toenails.

There is a talent show (depicted in the cover art), and the weird girl is the one in the pot.

The main character ends up tossing the weird girl out of a canoe, and leaves her bobbing in the lake. She tries to make up with her before they leave camp, but the weird girl yells at her in the cafeteria.

The main character goes home regretting what she did, and tries to think of some way to make amends.

 

127B: ‘the lemonade bubble’ or ‘yellow soda bubble’ series (Solved!)

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Looking for a children’s book-series (i remember three books – maybe there were more of them), with many illustrations.I read them at school library in South Africa around 1980/1981. The style the peoples were illustrated was sort of like Mick Inkpen-style. And it was always about to boys/young men. And after some thoughts it dawned to me, that the books seem to have described economical or political situations for children, worked into some fantastic stories. Here some of the contents/pictured scenes I remember:

One book was called something like ‘the lemonade bubble’ or ‘yellow soda bubble’, and was about producing lemonade in small scale at first, the production getting bigger and bigger with more profit and getting out of hand in the end, so that the market was drowned with too much yellow lemonade. Something like that. 

The second book contained something about posters showing some face maybe (?), glued to every wall in the town. And in the end of the story they invented a dragon-machine-truck, that ripped the posters off the walls, mixing it with different colours and spraying the paint back on the wall, thus making the town colourful again. It could be about elections or something like that?

Of the third book I remember little, but I know it was about a dispute among the two guys, and how they each set up a frontier/border and patrolling it, spying each other and so on.

The special thing of these books were the illustrations on the inside of the hardcovers – they showed how the main figures (two boys or young men?) ‘came into and left’ the book. In one book they came with an hot-air balloon (getting stuck on a church steeple)and left the book again with some sort of flying steps (taking one step from the bottom and adding it to the top – and this way climbing higher and away), in the next book they arrived with these steps and left through some underground tunnel, chasing a yellow butterfly. In the next book coming through the tunnels and leaving by some other way . . . and so on.