A poor family decided to go west and had to leave one of the daughters behind, as she was sick. They left her with a husband and wife. Her family was killed in a flash flood. She stayed with the couple, they are involved with the underground railroad
This was a three book series I read a few years ago. My library had them in the “young adult” section. I remember the book cover of one was green, I know one had vines on it. The book was about a girl and her family lived on a kind of farm and she finds this kind of tunnel. On the other side was a whole “colony” of these dwarf like things some of them had wings. There was this kind of Pegasus animal, it was small though and horse-like but had wings. I believe in the second book maybe the third the little girl gets sent to a boarding school and everyone thinks she crazy because she talks about these dwarf things.
One part of the book the Pegasus animal gets hurt and the girl takes care of it for a while in a sort of shed that her family no longer uses. At one point, I know, the two of them spend the night in a tree house sort of thing near the girls house. I know as you read the books it went back and forth of who was “narrating” like one or two chapters would be the girl side and then one or two chapters would be from the “dwarfs” side.
It was a kinda confusing series because it ended up that this little girl had had another life or something a long those lines. I don’t know how much help that is. There was something about a magical “touchstone” that guided the “dwarfs” they had migrated and at the end of the book they migrate again.
Children’s picture book in which a house follows a boy down the street. Read it with my boys in the late 70’s/early 80’s.
Probably read this in the early 1970s Two children, boy and girl, are turned into buttons by a woman (witch?). As buttons, they looked like carved bone and I think they were dressed as Pilgrims. They had to escape before they were sewn onto anything, because once they were sewn on, the change was permanent.
This is a book I read in 2006 or 2007, there are two little boys that at some point walk through a bunch of fog and end up at some kind of magic mansion where there’s a bunch of other kids. The mansion is maintained by a number of caretakers who can give the kids whatever they want and let them do whatever they want. There is also an old woman who tells the boys she’s lived there for ages and when she was a young girl the caretakers gave her as many cats as she wanted. At one point in the story it mentions one of her cats that has a tail curved like a question mark and it some how gets boiling water splashed on it and it runs in circles then drops dead. She also tells the boys about one of the caretakers who sits on the roof of the mansion and watches all of the kids to make sure they don’t try to leave. He kills any that do. He has big bat wings, his neck is made out of the tongues of the kids he killed, and his mouth is filled with their teeth. I vaguely recall him being referred to as some kind of brother and possibly being nicknamed the tongue thief. Eventually the boys want to go home, so the women tells them how to get past the beast on the roof and how to get through the fog. The boys make it out into the real world after being at the mansion maybe a week but realize that decades have past in the real world and their families are all old. The boys go back to the mansion to try and find a way back into their own timeline. That’s all I remember. I’m sorry about how scatter brained this sounds, but I wanted to get out as many details as possible because I really want to find this book.
This was a paperback, and I was born in 1974 so I would have read this sometime between, day, 1980 and 1988. Probably suited for ages 6-12.
There were beautiful spidery-looking line drawing illustrations – almost like Edward Gorey’s but a bit more complex and not so cartoony.
There were witch sisters, Agatha and Hecate. They were not good witches. There was a misguided/bad man who worked for the witches named Oswald. The main characters were (maybe) siblings and the other main character was a girl they met who knew her way around the magical world where the witches were, and the lot of them got out of troublesome situations by stomping three times on a manhole cover. when they did that, they would instantly be whisked out of the place and land somewhere else. They used this at least once to escape the witches and Oswald.
My sister remembers this from our school library when she was little. She would have seen this between ~1976-1986. It was illustrated, a book intended for 10-and-under children.
She remembers there was a character who was very small, a dwarf of gnome-like creature who wore a gold ring intended for a human, as a a belt. I’d love to find it for her and her kids!
I am looking for a children’s book that I read repeatedly at the public library back in the 60s. It was about 2 brothers that fought nonstop. One evening as they fought down a road into deep woods it started getting dark and cold. They decided to stop fighting long enough to start a fire to warm up to. Spying some “ember” up in a tree they climb the tree to “fetch” it and start the fire. Once they get up the tree they realize that it is an wild animal or monster. The remainder of the book is the brothers trying to get away from it. I always thought that the title was the Strange Thing. But I must be mistaken as I cannot find anything at all on that.
Thanks Again!
It is a children’s book that I only remember the cover of. It had a blue/black background and believed to be out in space with stars. It features a group of people and one of the cartoon girls was really pretty and floating above the people was an all white girl essentially bending around them. One girl was not attractive wearing possibly a rainbow colored dress. The group of people may have been standing on a planet.
I read this book in the 1980s and it was almost certainly a children’s book, but a real novel. It was set in Europe I believe.
Long ago a boy lost his parent in a nearby forest. The forest is malicious and very difficult to walk deep into. As you walk into the forest, the placement on trees you had to walk around would gradually turn you back so you exited. Several years after the lost parent the boy has grown up and is determined to enter deep into the forest. He hires an airplane to take overhead photos but winds blow it away. Eventually he does make it to the center and there’s some kind of mystery. I felt it was very well written, a thriller, and scary, too. It seemed to have been set in the 1950s. I hope that’s enough. I’d love to rediscover this book and was glad to pay the fee! Thank you! 🙂