Category Archives: Solved

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

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!

349B: Man disappears from London, found years later in French circus (Solved!)

I think this was an English mystery or part of one, maybe from the Golden Age of mysteries (Christie, Allingham, Sayers?) where a City man leaves his home to go to work, is seen by a tradesman at one end of a block, but never reaches the other end and is never seen again. Much publicity about his disappearance. Years later, someone — perhaps a young relative — finds him as part owner of a small circus in France, with his partner the neighbor woman with exotic snakes whose high brick wall in the middle of the block he vaulted over to live with her.

348Z: The Griffins Who Loved Tragedies and Other Short Stories (Solved!)

Collection of magical and wacky short stories for children, I believe it was an anthology of different authors, but I’m not sure. The edition I read in the 2000s had a cover illustrated with dancing pumpkins entwined with various characters from the short stories. It was old, maybe 70s or 80s? One story was of the pumpkins, someone tended them too well and they danced around the town causing havoc, another involved too much bubblegum. The only story I remember in detail was one of an author who wrote comedies. Everyone loved them, but he dreamed of writing tragedies. Whenever he tried submitting tragedies to his publisher, he was turned down. Being the father of two boys, he can’t afford to stop writing his jokes. These two boys also wanted a swimming pool. One night the author threw his tragedy out the window, and the pages floated to the mountains. The next few nights he heard crying coming from the mountain – and finally he went to investigate. There he found a griffin, crying over a few pages of his manuscript. Griffins, apparently, love tragedies. So the author offers to write him more, and give dramatic readings, and the griffin brings his friends, and their tears flow down the mountain, and become a natural swimming pool for the author’s boys, who become the best swimmers at their school.

348Y: The Magician’s Windows and Other Short Stories (Solved!)

Seeking a collection of magical, short stories for children illustrated with grayscale sketches. I believe it was one author. The edition I read in the earlier 2000s was older, maybe 60s or 70s, and had black and white sketches for each story. The stories I remember include one of an acrobat who had never touched the ground since the day they were born, and it ends sadly when their lover is hurt and they fall from the sky?; a magician who had different colored window panes in each room of his house, and to the children who visited each window looked out to a different world, a yellow desert, a green jungle, a blue Atlantis; and two sisters whose parents each separately made deals with the sun and the moon so the babies would live – when the girls were grown they were light and dark, life and death. The light girl was always singing and keeping the parents happy, but the dark girl never sang until the parents were tired of the light girl’s songs – then the dark girl sang her only song, a song of eternal rest. Mostly what I remember from the book was how mystical and melancholic it felt.

348W: Who Kidnapped Toddler? (Solved!)

British psychological thriller, probably 2019. Small child disappears from yard while young mother carelessly supervises her playtime.  Meanwhile, a married woman is in  a relationship which begins to reveal itself as rather strange and secretive. Her evasive husband becomes a suspect when coworker points finger in his direction, but his alibi is that his delivery route is far from the kidnapping site. Clues and suspicions build until his wife can no longer avoid suspecting his cagey behavior and question his guilt.

348T: Children’s book about alchemy, 1970s or 1980s (Solved!)

I had a book when I was a kid that I really liked a lot. I was born in 1976 so it would have been published before the mid-80s, probably. It was about an alchemist, possibly old and doddering, who was trying to turn lead into gold. If I remember correctly it had sort of sepia-toned line drawings, and there were quite detailed illustrations and instructions on how various alchemical apparatus worked. I remember illustrations of him working with tubes and liquids and flames and such. He also needed a unicorn horn so he had to get a young maiden to help him catch one. Can’t remember the title at all.

348Q: A little girl and a racoon (?) (Solved!)

This is a paperback book that I believe was bought new around 1980 – 1981. (I think my mom bought it, and we lived in Western Massachusetts at the time, although she gave it to me to read on a trip to New York City to visit my grandparents.) It was a slim book with pictures for school-age kids, but I think it was closer to the size of a typical chapter book rather than a picture book.
The story is about a little girl who at some point ends up fighting or having some kind of conflict with an animal outside, who I think was a racoon (although for some reason a fox also comes to mind, maybe instead of or in addition to the racoon? There also may have been no fox). The conflict in the story was quite emotional – I remember the little girl feeling both mad and maybe sad, and I’m pretty sure she also ultimately cared about the racoon/animal. The racoon/animal may have also been injured or in trouble somehow. I liked the story, but it wasn’t the most bright or cheerful tale.
I think the little girl had straight or wavy black hair worn up in a ponytail. I also feel like she wore a skirt ending above her bare knees. The pictures were delicate, and – at least in some cases – had dark features or strong shadows. The color I remember most apart from the dark aspects is orange…which kind of overlaps with my memory of a fox and its reddish-orange fur.

348O: Book with a page that is a dream about nose turning into a pickle w/ illustration (Solved!)

It is a kids book from the 1990s, possibly got it through Scholastic book fair. The book is a disjointed collection of chapters or stories that are all related to night time, getting ready for bed, dreaming. The page and the only part of the story I remember most vividly is about having a dream that her nose turns into a pickle and she breaks it off and eats it, and on the page is an illustration of a kid with a big pickle nose.

Book was hard cover, dark blue, about the same size and length as Graeme Base’s “Animalia”.

The title itself is not about the pickle nose dream, and possibly is a little generic and so it is hard to search for, because the page I can remember and the title are likely unrelated (i.e. pickle is not in the title of the book) but the illustration of the kid with the big pickle nose is etched into my brain.
The illustrations were very beautiful, almost surreal, a little bit like Chris Van Allsberg but less realistic and more cartoon-ish, almost cubist. I remember one page had an illustration of a lone house at night time and all the windows are illuminated and it was very beautiful.
This is a long shot, but in searching on reddit I actually found other people who are trying to figure out what this book was called!