Category Archives: Solved

374Z: Children’s book that existed between 1992-2002 (Solved!)

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Full color picture book. A boys parents warn him not to go into woods. He sneaks out anyway, each page is a separate part of the woods and he encounters a unique type of creature/monster per page. I think one is like a colony of tree people, but at the end of the woods and in the final pages he starts getting chased by a smog creature, for like 4 pages he’s just running as the color pages are filling up with smoke. He barely escaped the forest and gets back into house or bed and thinks to himself “never doing that again”. The big part of the book is the escaping through the forest and running home from the smoke (which looks similar to a dragon maybe) but I think they never reveal what the monster is. This book is probably 14-33 pages. The other identifier is that each stage of the forest is a unique creature. Fantasy vibes. Pretty sure the book as color as well. – I know it’s not where are the wild things, and I know it’s not the tomtins. 

374U: Gentleman Falls for Horse-Loving Woman (Solved!)

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I am an avid classic novel reader and I read a book a few years ago and absolutely cannot figure out what it was. It reads very similar to a Brontë but I don’t think it was very mainstream, since no one else seems to recognize it.
It was set in the 1800s I think somewhere in the United Kingdom.
The plot was about this spunky brunette who was beautiful and unconventional. I remember her riding horses. She didn’t follow social norms and people had difficulty with that back then. Men kept falling for her. The main part of the plot was about a gentleman who falls for her against all his better judgement, proposes, and she declines. He licks his wounds and eventually marries a much more conventional easy going woman and they end up making a great pair, but the girl always wondered how he felt since she was his second choice. Ultimately, the spunky girl does settle down with someone and they are all able to be friends.
It’s not Far From the Madding Crowd or Portrait of a Lady or Age of Innocence or Pride and Prejudice.
If you can figure it out, I will be overjoyed.

354S: Tripping Across the Desert (Solved!)

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I don’t have much to go on. It was a book I got from the library in the mid-1990s. It was a children’s book. It was fantasy. My mom didn’t care for it because it was too “weird.” It had a girl who I think was crossing a desert for some reason. I know she came to the edge of the desert and it was a cliff or drop-off, and I think she floated down (or up?) somehow. She might have been on a cloud or holding an umbrella? Honestly, it so frustrating because I remember loving it but can’t remember hardly any of the plot. I just know it was very trippy, like Alice in Wonderland level odd things. Like the person who wrote it was hallucinating. Lol. Thanks for any help you can give! 

374M: The Rose of Death (Solved!)

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Seeking a murder mystery about drowned boy who was bullied probably published around 2000-2003, maybe up to 2005 this book was for high schooler and young adults and I think the cover was blue with a rose. The main story line of the book was an investigator was trying to find the cause of death of a teenage boy who was found in the river who they initially thought was a drowning but then found stool in his lungs that was his cause of asphyxiation. The river had once had a sewage issue, but that was investigated and found that the problem was fixed. He was accidentally killed by other students who gave him a swirly (dunked head into a toilet) that had stool in it that caused him to suffocate. The reason that he was given the swirly was he had a crush on a girl and had given her a rose he had changed the color of from red to (possibly) blue as a magic trick, the book did describe the chemical trick used to perform this. I do not remember the color of the rose, apologies. The girl’s bf or some other significant male figure.

374D: Mix-and-Match Fantasy Party (Solved!)

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I had this book as a child in the 90’s. It was a mix and match book with pictures of fantasy characters, and I believe there were 3-4 flaps that you could arrange to decide on their hat, face, torso, and bottom half. It was very obvious what the correct/incorrect options were, but they lined up well enough to make it a fun mix-and-match game. Each character was humanoid, but all fantastical.
There was not much text, but the basic premise was that these were all guests who needed to look their best for a party or wedding or something. It was a hardcover book with spiral bindings inside. The cover was white and had a magician, dressed in a purple domed hat, brown/black hair, a purple masquerade mask with frills on each side, and purple jacket while holding an orb I believe. The art style was very intricate and high fantasy. There was one page with a bride and a groom, and when they were lined up properly, their bodies formed a distinct heart shape. Towards the end, there was a king and a queen.
Unsure of publishing date – I had a copy of this starting in the mid 90’s at least, so it could not have been after that point. 

374A: Groundhog Day (Solved!)

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I’m looking for a kid’s book likely from the 70’s to early 80’s about a groundhog whose friends didn’t want him to see his shadow so they brought him food when he woke up to keep him in his bed. They emptied all the surrounding gardens but he was still hungry. He wanted to leave his den to get more food but they tried to keep him in. When he asked them why he couldn’t leave they told him they did not want him to see his shadow. After this he informs them that ground hog day was yesterday and he’d slept through it. I have looked for this book for years, even when I was a school librarian for a little while and haven’t been able to locate it. My mom doesn’t remember the name of it but does remember that we had it.Thank you for any help you can give for this.