Category Archives: Status

297D: Everything is going to be okay (Solved)

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I’m trying to find a book, it’s about a boy who’s parents are separated. He writes a letter pretending to be his mother, and sends it to his father. The letter is asking for forgiveness and for the father to come back to live with them. The boys attempt to get his parents back together fails. In the last part of the book, the boy is in the movie theater with the girl he likes and she asks him, “is everything ok?” And he replies, “yes, everything is going to be ok”. (This is everything I remember.) Also the name of the book might be something like “shy guy” or “guy shy” or just something with guy in it. I hardly remember anything about it.

 

Thanks!

297B: The heavens rain down every imaginable desire (Solved)

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I’m looking for a children’s book about an orphan girl who sleeps in the alleys, gets chased from the Bakers shop while peering through the window hungry. There is a terrible storm one night and the heavens rain down every imaginable desire of hers. Toys, food, bed, clothing- the next day the stash of goods makes a front-line story and the little girl is adopted. The book ends with the girl running out into a thunderstorm thanking the heavens. Hoping this description rings a bell.

296Y: Haunted house with shrunken ghost (Solved)

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I am looking for the title of a book from my childhood. I was born in 1982. The book might be a Bugs Bunny book where he moves to a new house and doesn’t realize the house already has someone living there; a ghost. The ghost tries everything to scare Bugs Bunny away. He rattles chains, he moans, nothing works. Finally late one night the ghost and Bugs have an encounter and somehow Bugs spills juice on the ghost. Now the ghost is really depressed, can’t get rid of Bugs and has a stain. So Bugs washes the ghosts sheet and accidentally shrinks him to a tiny ghost. Distraught and embarrassed the ghost and Bugs work through their problems and end up sharing the house as friends.

Side note: it might not be Bugs Bunny, it might be the Pink Panther. I can’t remember!

296X: Yellow Cape/Yellow door

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This book was on the shelves of the library of my middle school in the early 60’s.  I would find it by the cover, which I think showed a tree with a round door.  Not unlike Hobbiton, the story was about small people and their society.  They lived in hollow trees. The thing I remember best is that the individuals wore capes that matched the color of their front door.

 

296W: Sci-Fi Retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey

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I read this in the late 1970s. A 12ish year old boy living in a rural area of the US notices small lakes are disappearing in his area. He deduces that aliens are stealing the water to use for fuel and starts watching for their ship, which he boards when he sees it. The ship takes off while he is aboard and the rest of the book is his adventures in trying to return home. There are other abductees from other planets already on board who become his crew. It is a loose re-telling of Homer’s The Odyssey in that the boy travels from planet to planet aboard the ship and encounters people who are recognizably the Lotus-Eaters, the Cyclops, Circe, etc. Because it’s a children’s book, many of the details are toned down. For example, the Cyclops had poor vision and thus needed to wear a thick lens to see, which the adventurers broke to “blind” him. I remember very well there was a full-page painting of the boy in the Cyclops cave, which might have been the cover of the book.

 

296V: Family moves to country home

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This book was from my elementary school library, read around 1967. The book was older, 1950s or 1940s. A family that was either down on their luck, or through an inheritance, move to a house in the country that came with African-American servants. This might have been in the South and it seems as though there was an adjustment. I recall food scenes, such as how much the family enjoyed the fresh baked biscuits. This might have been their first encounter with them. In another scene, the mother twists her ankle while walking through the garden and sits alone until she was found because she was in too much pain to walk. What struck me was that this was the first book I read that was told from both an adult and a child’s viewpoint. There was a mystery involved too but I don’t recall whether the house was haunted.

296U: Teenage model (Solved)

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I read this book, from my high school library, around 1972. It was contemporary at that time. The main character was a pretty, poised girl who gets a job as a fashion model. This scene might have occurred during the hiring process, which took place at a restaurant. She gets the impression that one of the men is flirting with her, so she asks if he has children. When he says yes, she asks to see pictures of them, which distracts him from the flirting so she feels as though she has rejected him without offending him. The girl has a nerdy younger brother and this scene only stays in my mind because a friend who also read it asked me “what are the runs” when she gets to this part. The main character stays home with her younger brother when he has the runs. Although they typically quarrel like siblings do, she feels bad for him this day and is kind.