Category Archives: Status

349U: Specific Edition Flower Fairies of the Garden

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I am looking for the specific edition of a book I read repeatedly as a child. It was a Cicely Mary Barker book, pretty sure it was Flower Fairies of the Garden. It was a small book, with a mostly white cover. I’m not sure the cover illustration. It had to have been published before 1992. It might have been part of a set. The first poem in the book was The Forget-me-not Fairy that begins something like “Where do fairy babies lie/til they’re old enough to fly/here’s a likely place I think/midst these flowers blue and pink”. Other fairies in this edition included Scilla, Geranium, and Sweet Pea. I have purchased at least five different printings of this book, and none has included the forget-me-not fairy. Can you help?

349T: Rich boy repairs exotic bird’s broken beak with soap

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The story is of a wealthy little boy who seems to be without parents.  There is a butler.  He receives a gift of an exotic bird (parrot/macaw/toucan?) who injures his beak and the boy fixes it with a bar of soap.  A heavy-set woman visits who I believe is an opera singer.  The illustrations are pen and ink with some color, but my overwhelming memory of the book is that it is basically in black, white and red.  All the characters, as I remember have large ovoid heads and small bodies.
I bought this book for my son in the early 2000s.  

349S: Picture Book about Spoiled Rotten Princess Who Lives With the Gypsies (Solved!)

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Here are all the details I can remember:
 
It was a picture book, but one with medium to a lot of words. I read it between 1990-1992, and I think it might have been a new copy, but I have no idea when the copyright was. I remember really loving the pictures!
 
It was a story about a little princess who is so loved by her father, but she is spoiled rotten and for her birthday he hires some gypsies to perform for her. She throws a fit over something and then, after she’s supposed to be in bed, she overhears him say that he wishes she would be a sweet girl (possibly like one of the gypsy girls?) or she will not be fit to run the kingdom.  
 
She either runs away or is taken by the gypsies, and they live a life of hard work and expect her to do it too. After only a little while, she fits right in and her skin turns brown from being out in the sun, and she almost forgets about her former life. 
 
The gypsies perform for lots of people, and they teach her to perform too. One day they go to a castle that seems familiar, but it isn’t until she sees her father that she remembers her previous home. She runs to his arms and he commends her for learning to be good. 
 
Anyway, that’s about all I can remember. I hope you can help!

349R: Travelog about Mongolia and Siberia with a female shaman

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The shaman woman told the author was identified as a shaman when a child because she did everything backwards, sleeping all day and staying awake all night. The author visited her in her remote tent in deep forest. Another girl they met was pleased to have won a prize for her poem about pine needles being her pillow and the forest stream being her wine. I think her poem started with “I am a girl of the Tuva”. It may have been about living in the Taiga? I think it was written in the 1990s. I read it in the first decade of the 1990s. I borrowed it from Plymouth Library in England.

349Q: The Four Elementals and the Earth Children Raised in World with Magic

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The book was a children’s/YA book published sometime between 2005 and 2012. It was meant to be a quartet. I know 2 came out and I was curious if it was ever finished.
It had two main characters, a boy on earth who was disabled because he born on a world with magic. And a girl who is from earth but was raised in the world with magic, she’s the only one who can’t use magic and is immune to it.
There are evil magicians who can travel between the worlds, but doing so damages the worlds. The two main characters can move back and forth together but it damages the worlds. They’re told the only solution is to seek help from each of four elementals, societies of magic creatures that, if all four can be convinced to help, can make a bridge between the worlds in a safe way. Both of the main characters have to go to their birth worlds or it’s bad for the fabric of the universe or something, and this can only be accomplished with their help. The bad guys use dark magic and want to hunt them down. The boy struggles to learn the magic of his birth world. The first book dealt with the water elementals and the second with the earth elementals, I think. I think the name of the magic world started with an F
There’s a scene where the girl is on earth for the first time while they’re on the run and they go to a McDonald’s and she experiences a soda for the first time. I think her name starts with a K (Kira?)and the boy’s might be Marcus.

349P: Forest Girl Falls in Love with City Boy

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I read this as a young adult (I was born in 1976). It was a beautiful novel about a girl who grew up in the forest with little / no interaction with the outside world. I remember she had a vivid imagination and maybe had a magical lake or bog she would visit. She meets someone from the “city” and they fall in love. I seem to remember he gave her gloves and she didn’t know what gloves were. I now have teenage daughters and would love to share this novel with them.
I’ve done a lot of searching with the words girl, lost, forest, tree but can’t seem to figure it out.

349O: Children Look for Missing Mother, Who Got in Accident

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A young mother leaves her children to go for a romantic night away with her boyfriend. She realised her mistake and rushes home but is in an accident.
The children are unaware but continue going to school pretending all is OK. They go on a school trip near the location of her night away and look for her. They also have an accident  and all are reunited at the hospital.

349M: The Empty Valley Mystery

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All I remember about this book is that a group of kids (who were maybe related. There were two brothers?) ended up in this absolutely empty valley - there was a plane involved. And they explore this valley - find a cave to live in. And at some point they solve a mystery - a chicken is involved - and they find gold. And then get rescued. This was is the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew genre. All I remember about the cover is that it had a numeral of sorts on it. Also, in another book in the same series one of the brothers finds a rare bird - a great auk or something.

349L: Scaring Moose by Yelling in French

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In the early 1960s we had a picture book that was probably published in the 1950s. It was about a man and boy walking through the woods, possibly in Canada. The man was likely a lumberjack.

At the climactic moment, they encounter a moose on the trail. The man scares it away by yelling “Marche donc!”
This is all I remember about the book.