Category Archives: Solved

351D: Two Black Girls Grow Apart at Summer Camp (Solved!)

8 Replies

Two black girls from NYC (I believe) have an opportunity to go to summer camp, maybe upstate? Catskills? Adirondacks?  One loves it, the other misses the city. They are best friends. Book describes city life well: hydrants on to cool the girls off, the cool of the apartment, waiting for mom to get home, making lunch, very detailed as I recall, which makes sense given how much I love richly described characters. Then off to camp where I believe the girls drift apart a bit.  I loved it and would love to know the title.

350X: Sensory-Enhanced Man’s Girlfriend Not What She Seems (Solved!)

1 Reply

The novel is about a man who works at an agency for people with advanced senses who use them to foil art thieves and bank robberies, and throughout the course of the story the protagonist becomes more and more paranoid as he is continuously foiled by a cat burglar who knows which poisons he is weak against. He believes his girlfriend is cheating on him, and gave away his secret, but it turns out she Is the cat burglar. The infidelity is a lie planted by his best friend, who is secretly a mobster trying to get revenge for a robbery he foiled.
I distinctly remember one specific scene, where he hits a man in the face with a large dildo.

350U: Buddhist Quest Starring a Monkey (Solved!)

2 Replies

This is a book from (I'm guessing) the early 90s. It's a comic book re-telling of the famous "Journey to the West." It's a Buddhist story about a monkey that is born in an amethyst geode. The monkey makes friends in a pig, a tiger, and maybe a dragon and they all have adventures. A big part of their quest involves a Buddhist monk Tripitaka and sacred scriptures. They meet several demons and bodhisattvas along the way. It was a relatively thin hardcover. I do remember something about a "Purple Monkey" but cannot be sure. My sister and I loved reading it 🙂

350T: Red Dot Escape (Solved!)

2 Replies

This book would have been read to me in the late 70’s as a child. A man is locked in a stone tower or room (maybe in a castle) with only a small window at the very top. He must find a way out without opening the door. He ends up covering himself in red dots so the guards think he’s ill and take him out, he has found a way out without having opened the door. It was like a puzzle or riddle of sorts. I believe the man had red hair or a red beard.

350R: Daughter of Lord Leads Resistance to Keep Father in Power (Solved!)

4 Replies
I’m searching for a book that I can only remember the plot of. When I was around 13 I read a book about a girl who was the daughter of a lord. (I’m 35 now, so it would have been written 1998 or earlier). She was poor and was the leader of a small resistance trying to keep her father in his lordship. Eventually she got hurt and captured. She was brought to the capital. To the people she had spent over a year fighting. Once she got there she found that there was far more going on than she realized and the people she had been fighting were their own quiet resistance.
I don’t remember the picture on the front. It was YA, fantasy.
There was one scene that stood out. She received a gift from a “secret admirer”; it was a ring. Which finger you wore the ring on meant different things. She didn’t know that so she wore it on the one that fit.
I borrowed the book from the library and to this day I think about that book. I want to read it again but I can’t remember the title or author.

350I: Boy raised in India starts hunger strike with classmates in US (Solved!)

3 Replies

I remember a fiction book from when I was a kid about a boy who was raised in India by his father. But when his father died (and there was a part where I remember the boy going out on the river to dump his father’s cremated ashes), he ends up having to move to the US to live with his grandmother (I think). He was probably middle school aged? He struggles a bit to fit in, but then when his grandmother’s house ends up being threatened by a new highway going through, the boy convinces several of his classmates to come over to the house and they start a hunger strike that ultimately results in the house being saved. Some of those details may be a little shaky, but that’s more or less what I remember. Thanks for any help!

350E: Supposedly Heroic Girl Dies in Apartment House Fire (Solved!)

8 Replies

Looking for a 1970s ya fiction book about a girl who died in an apartment house fire. Everyone thought that she was a hero because she alerted the other tenants to the fire so they could get out. Actually, it was her brother who had done the alerting while she went back to her apartment to get her shoe box of paper doll families. This was a much darker sequel to a book about a brother, a sister and another girl. Think the title may have been something like “The truth about (girl’s name)”, but not positive. Don’t remember author but know I read it right after it came out somewhere between 1969 and 1980.

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

3 Replies

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!