Category Archives: Status

370W: Child/pre-teen collection of eccentric stories occurring at a school/office

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I can’t remember whether the stories are related or unrelated. A girl named Erika/Erica presents something to her class (I think it was a poem or short writing), but her name is not revealed until the end of the story/chapter, when the teacher calls her up to the front to present. Another character figures out how to hypnotize people to bawk like chickens or do other things. The book is relatively short (probably around 100 pages) and I read it around 5 years ago. The stories were quite unusual, and I first found and read it in an elementary school classroom.

370V: Teen boy wakes up and nobody can see him, he thinks he’s dead (Solved!)

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I read this book as a kid in the 1970s. I don’t remember much, except that a teen boy wakes up in the morning and soon realizes that nobody can see him. He thinks he’s dead. He can’t really interact with the world, but he does manage to ride a bus without falling through the floorboards. It might be that he never existed–I seem to remember that people weren’t wondering where he was. It might have the word “disappear” in it.

370T: Current Events and How to Explain to Children Via Different Religions

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Description: immediately post 9/11, in New York (I think), 3 women meet to “brainstorm” what/how to tell their children about that event. One woman is a Christian, another a Muslim and the third is Jewish. Their meetings continue as they compare and contrast how their religious backgrounds lead them to view both current happenings and each other.

370S: All About Puberty

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Looking for a pre-teen girl book I read in the late 80s/early 90s that was already really dated. The girl in the book is going through puberty and gets her period. But the maxi pads still have the belt and the hooks. My friend and I just saw Are you there God? and for the life of us we can’t remember this book. They may have also been a part about keeping notes in a notebook about puberty.

370R: Teen boy with blue hair (maybe!) flees bad guys and escapes to parallel world with help of mongoose (maybe!) (Solved!)

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I read this book as a teen in the early 1970s. It had a typical teen book dust jacket design from the 70s: pen/watercolor painting of profile of boy with blue hair (I think) and I have a memory that it was called “The Blue Boy” or something similar but all searches have turned up nothing appropriate. 
Anyway, this memory is decades old, but what I recall is that this teen boy (probably orphan? no parents present in the story that I can recall) is somehow involved with a gang of bad people. Perhaps boy has magical abilities that they are taking advantage of for ill-gotten gains? Perhaps boy has blue hair as a gimmick? Maybe there is no blue hair but I swear there was. In any event, boy decides to escape from his situation and is pursued by bad guys who want to recapture? kill? otherwise cause problems for him. Boy is on the lam and has an unexpected mysterious ally who brings him food and perhaps finds him safe spaces to live. In my memory this ally is a talking mongoose, but crikey, how does this narrative even make sense? The boy is astonished to get ripe mangoes when in his world (the world of our narrative), mangoes are still green and unripe; months and months away from ripeness. It turns out this ally is from a parallel world, and the book ends with the ally helping our boy escape his pursuers by moving to the parallel universe. In my memory, book ends with boy on a sunrise-shining beach in this parallel world. 
I read it in English, but nothing about the story seems to be set in North America (mongoose and mangoes, or at least mangoes even if the mongoose is a figment of my imagination or faulty memory). 

370Q: Traveling Aunt Seek and Find Book

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I have a query for you: I was delighted in a seek-and-find book as a child in the mid-1990s which, if my memory serves me correctly, followed a globe-trotting aunt. The reader was always one stop behind her, and to try to catch her was required to find objects and people in each image spread.
The book was large, slim, hard-backed, and had relatively little text. As usual for this genre, the images were visually busy illustrations in a reasonably realistic style.  I have no memory of the title nor the author, but I do remember that some of the locations included an Australian beach (with people wearing white sunblock on their noses), a wet market in Asia (lots of produce and people wearing straw hats) and an airport scene with a man tearing up his tickets. I am fairly certain there was also a scene of people at a ski lodge with lots of snow and chair lifts, but that image is less clear than the others. Each of these scenes took up a full two-page spread.
I read it between 1994 and 2000, although I do not know if it was published before that.  

370P: Sheep Discovering New Places (Solved!)

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Here is  the description:

I am trying to locate a children’s illustrated book that i had in England, that was likely published in the 1980’s , but definitely not after the early 1990’s. It had beautiful detailed illustrations, and was about 2 sheep investigating different areas, such as beaches and tidal pools. The illustrations were amazingly detailed, for instance, the tidal pools would be covered in rocks, bottles, animals, sea weed, plants etc- you could look through the individual pages for hours on end, but the stories always involved the two white sheep. They were drawn realistically, and not “cartoony” at all. I believe it may have been a series of books. Please let me know if you have any information!

Key aspects:


>>>> -About 2 sheep exploring new places
>>>> -realistic and extremely detailed illustrations
>>>> -Likely part of a series of books
>>>> -Purchased in England, likely a European publication (but not sure)
>>>> -Printed circa 1980’s-early 90’s if not earlier


Please please can you see if you can identify this for me? I would love to be able to show my own children this!

Please let me know if you need any further information! I also commented on the Disqus back in august 2018 but it is so far back I could not locate my comment. It’s possible someone may have replied

370O: Children’s Paperback Picture Book, circa 1980, girl monster/purple dinosaur with a red dress, beautifully illustrated

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Hello, Stumpers. To the best of my memory, this is a Children’s Paperback Picture Book, circa 1980.

It was set in a woods, populated with monsters, near a lake that featured heavily. I think our protagonist – a girl monster whose face resembled a purple baby dinosaur, and who wore a red dress with puffy sleeves – saw her reflection in the water and got scared, or didn’t understand it was her.

It was beautifully illustrated line work, trying to make things look realistic with texture and shading, versus the looser style and flat coloring of a Mercer Mayer or Richard Scarry.