I’m looking for a picture book with beautiful, lifelike illustrations. Picture book, but dark and almost adult in nature. There were two in the series.
The first had a small blond girl, with braids over her head, who was the rightful queen of a kingdom ruled by a dark tyrant. At one point she confronts the tyrant by landing on his dinner table, I think. The tyrant might wear a weird mask. He’s dressed all in black. She has friends who wanted to help her get her kingdom back. They set up a system where they would light a fire on the upper level of the castle when it was safe for them all to start their attack. One man was stopped, but is so dedicated to her and the cause, that he lit himself on fire instead and jumped from the roof.

In the sequel, she has a baby (still blond braids roped over her head), and a soldier tries to lead her through the snow to safety. I think they all die, but I’m not sure it’s obvious.
Beautiful illustrations.

We’d love to reconnnect with this children’s book we had from our local library, but despite extensive online searching, can find no trace of it, as cannot remember or even guess at the title.

Illustrated short children’s book from c. 1990, for readers perhaps 5 – 9. The young heroine (age 8-ish, possibly called Anna) is not good at timekeeping, and is often late for tea. She therefore observes that ‘time is [like] a monster, marching on’. She meets the clock-keeper of the town hall clock, asks him about the nature of time, and he kindly on one occasion puts the clock back about 5 minutes, so that she does not seem late home for tea. The story and pictures have a mainland European feel to it. Someone suggested it may have been set in Switzerland. It is almost certainly a translation into English, and the English has that sense of maintaining a foreign idiom.
If this resonates with anything you recall, we will be overjoyed!

I’m looking for a book my fiance read when he was in primary school.
He borrowed it from the Bookrunner Bus (a library van which visited primary schools), and he thinks he was 8 or 9 at the time. This means it will be from before 2000.
It was a short, children’s paperback, but had black and white illustrations – which he believes were in a similar style to Edward Gorey.
It was about a young boy living in a house with his mother and big buildings were being constructed all around, which cast shadows over his house. In the end the boy and his mother have to move to an apartment in one of the bigger buildings. There might also have been some sort of pet bird, but he can’t fully remember! He did mention that it was a really odd, creepy book.

If this sounds familiar to anyone, please let me know! I really would love to get it him for Christmas.

One book that I learned to read with really stuck in my head because it was very similar to my own situation: A little sister who kept tagging around after her big sister trying to do everything she did and saying “Me too!” in every instance. I could swear the big sister was a brunette and the little sister was a blonde (as we were). My mom was trying to teach my big sister how to read, and even though I was only about 3 at the time, I wanted to learn right alongside her, because, well, “Me too!” I know there is a 1983 Mercer Meyer book along these same lines, but it has non-human protagonists and the older sibling is a brother. The book I’m looking for would have been published at least 10 years before that.

It’s a children’s book (I believe) with beautiful illustrations. The story centers on a girl, very possibly with blond hair. She is kind to the animals and to nature, unlike those around her (perhaps she has a sister who is deliberately unkind). As a result, toward the end, the birds come together and make her a beautiful dress made entirely of brightly-colored feathers. The dress has a long train and peacock feathers seem to feature prominently. It might be a wedding dress.

I read it in the 1980s as a young child, but it could be an older book.