A book bought in late 70s Australia (possibly UK published) picture book about a kingdom in black & white & wizard. Under the direction from the king who decides to make it colourful, first turns blue and everyone is miserable, then red and everyone is angry, then yellow everyone becomes ill. Eventually the magic goes crazy and the colours mix to give full pallet and all ends well.
A children’s book I read in the early-to-mid 90s; could have been published earlier. A school cafeteria serves chicken (I think), possibly tenders. The chicken is delicious and possibly addictive. A student, male, investigates the cafeteria situation and, towards the end of the book, discovers that the chicken is made with a poisonous ingredient hidden in the cafeteria kitchen that gives it its flavor/addicting quality; the ingredient is stored in a large vat. There’s a fight between the hero and the evil cafeteria employee. The book is NOT Bone Chillers: Back to School or Eat Your Poison Dear.
I was born in 1965 and remember this book from when I was around 5-7.
It was about a painter that lived on a houseboat and painted abstract paintings. For some reason he broke the painting up into a bunch of small paintings and a buyer flew to his houseboat by seaplane to buy them I think the houseboat was near San Francisco. It was a large book, hardback, and illustrated.
The book was divided into several sections, most or all narrated in first person and each about one of the Biblical matriarchs: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, etc. Along the lines of “The Red Tent” but young adult and published somewhere around 1980, give or take a couple of years. The author was female, and I think it was published in US (though possibly UK or other British Commonwealth, since I got it out of a Canadian library).
I’m looking for a children’s poem book published probably in the 1950s (it was read to me in the late 1950s-early 1960s) that included a poem with the line, “Elephang, Pelephant, walla walla welephant,” or something like that.
The (few) details:
Adult book
Title might include the word yellow
A short book, maybe 200 pages
Paperback
Read at least 15 years ago
Novel set in Southeast Asia
A woman wanders, losing herself, maybe also a child. Odd, sad, poetic, confusing. She may be starving and mentally ill, badly treated
I hope that’s enough to unearth the title! That would be wonderful.
Thank you.
A large (10” x 12”?) hardback book of fairy poems. I received this book as a a gift in the late 1950s. There is a poem, “Ring Around the Moon” inside, and a large illustration either on the cover or inside of a tree with fairies. It is illustrated throughout with fairies in magical landscapes.
Thanks to the Sunday NY Times, I now know who to ask the question that has been nagging at me for years: what O what was the book for teens (they didn’t call them YA novels yet) that I read in the 1960s (might’ve been published then, but also could’ve been published in the late 1950s) in which a daydreamy teenage girl envisioned painting her room gold, then painted it, then was bitterly disappointed that the walls were in fact “mustard yellow.” I remember nothing else about the girl, the story (or the walls) but the book must have had some kind of profound effect on me, because I’m over 60 now, a novelist and an English professor, and have read many, many novels since–and I’ve never forgotten it.
I read this novel in 1963 or 1964. A little girl is left to live with a childless couple in an apartment building, because her father goes away for work. The other children in the building talk about her among themselves, thinking she is like a snooty princess. But no, she is a very lonely little girl, and has only one possession, a doll. There is a broken wagon, and the children become friends with the girl when they all work together to repair the wagon. The wagon is a bed for the doll and it is given to the girl to take with her when her father returns.
This is a picture book from the early 80s. My mom thinks it came from a mail order book club. Kids in an apartment building have amphibian pets: turtles, alligator. . . the alligator gets stuck in a tree. Balloons get him out (or got him in?). At the end the kids get a rooftop garden for their pets. Over the course of the story you see an ornate fountain being built in town.