Category Archives: Solved

132A: Girl being stirred in a pot (solved)

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Bought this around 1986 (6th grade book fair!) and cannot remember the title or main character names. Loved the story though, and hope I can find it for my daughter.

The hardback cover was green, and the picture was of three girls singing and stirring a fourth girl in a pot.

The story was of a girl in her early teens at summer camp. She ends up feeling saddled with another girl who is strange and a little disgusting – the weird girl borrows a barrette from the main character and uses it to clean her toenails.

There is a talent show (depicted in the cover art), and the weird girl is the one in the pot.

The main character ends up tossing the weird girl out of a canoe, and leaves her bobbing in the lake. She tries to make up with her before they leave camp, but the weird girl yells at her in the cafeteria.

The main character goes home regretting what she did, and tries to think of some way to make amends.

 

131B: Military School Sci-Fi Fantasy (SOLVED)

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I am looking for a YA sci-fi/fantasy book I read when I was a kid. I believe it came out in hardcover in the US in or around 1988. It was about 12 boys sent to a military/reform school, I think the school was called Kah Nagallah or something like that. I seem to remember that the story was told from the POV of a boy who was being sent to the school with his adopted brother, who was autistic. The faculty secretly trained the boys to go on a mission to a subterranean kingdom to retrieve a powerful object, I think it was called the Vroon. The boys started calling themselves ‘the Coyotes’ and their symbol was a nautilus shell with an arrow through it. The boys escape the control of the faculty and recover the Vroon for themselves and use it for good.
The book was long, over 300 pages I think. It had some b&w illustrations. The cover art was a drawing of the boys riding in a tracked vehicle with a dome through a cavern.

 

130B: Stumpy ballerina girls (Solved!)

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Kids picture book (large size at least 8×10″) for little girls, about a group of girls, about 4-8 of them, and they are very short and stumpy (e.g. thick legs) with big heads. They are sweet and passive. They do girly things, including ballet. Or maybe ballet through the whole book. At one part of the book they might get sleepy and take a nap under a tree. At one part there might be a group of boys who antagonize them. I read it during my childhood approx 1984-1992, so it can’t be newer than that and it is likely not much older.

Another way to describe the girls: they look human but they have doll-like proportions. Maybe they are dolls?

Update:

“The Little Girls’ Dance Class” by J. Carruth (1984).
I was able to find it through https://www.worldcat.org/ using the search criteria (year 1975-1993, juvenile, fiction, book). At first I tried searching all the “Ballerinas”, no luck. “Ballet”, no luck. I was going to do “dance” next (a lot of searches) but something all of a sudden told me to try “dance class” was something in the title so I searched that and found it! Wow, I was almost in tears when I saw the photo of the cover. I bought myself a copy online. I submitted the request on this site over 7.25 years ago, and thought of it many times since then. I never actually came back to check the site to see if there were any replies until today, and I was really disappointed there weren’t any, so that’s why I searched again on my own. The other reason I keep being reminded of this book over the years… so there’s this interesting physical/emotional feeling I get, maybe a couple times a year, it feels like my legs are stumpy/stubby like the girls’ legs in the book. Like I feel like the girls in book.

128A: short story read about 40 years ago

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I’m trying to figure out the title and author of a short story I read about 40 years ago in a collection of short stories.  It was about an old woman who lives alone in Japan? China?  I think the old woman is from America.  She has a lovely garden but is very upset because some kind of animal is sleeping in her flower beds and ruining her flowers.  She hires a night watchman who’s supposed to go around at night making noise to keep the animal away from her garden.  She is very demanding and critical of the watchman; she wants things done just so.  The old woman feels the night watchman is lazy, etc…She continues to get more and more frustrated and near the end of the story she goes out to see what he’s doing and finds that he is the one who has been sleeping in her flower beds and ruining everything. She runs away screaming and jumps off a cliff (this now sounds very over dramatic, but it seemed to work in the story.)  The night watchman later reports that he saw an angel running toward the cliff…

 

I have a vague memory that the story might have been called “The Angel,” and an even vaguer recollection that the story’s author might have been Pearl Buck — BUT, it was definitely a short story and it WASN’T The Fighting Angel, the novel Buck wrote that was loosely based on her father’s life as a missionary.

 

127B: ‘the lemonade bubble’ or ‘yellow soda bubble’ series (Solved!)

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Looking for a children’s book-series (i remember three books – maybe there were more of them), with many illustrations.I read them at school library in South Africa around 1980/1981. The style the peoples were illustrated was sort of like Mick Inkpen-style. And it was always about to boys/young men. And after some thoughts it dawned to me, that the books seem to have described economical or political situations for children, worked into some fantastic stories. Here some of the contents/pictured scenes I remember:

One book was called something like ‘the lemonade bubble’ or ‘yellow soda bubble’, and was about producing lemonade in small scale at first, the production getting bigger and bigger with more profit and getting out of hand in the end, so that the market was drowned with too much yellow lemonade. Something like that. 

The second book contained something about posters showing some face maybe (?), glued to every wall in the town. And in the end of the story they invented a dragon-machine-truck, that ripped the posters off the walls, mixing it with different colours and spraying the paint back on the wall, thus making the town colourful again. It could be about elections or something like that?

Of the third book I remember little, but I know it was about a dispute among the two guys, and how they each set up a frontier/border and patrolling it, spying each other and so on.

The special thing of these books were the illustrations on the inside of the hardcovers – they showed how the main figures (two boys or young men?) ‘came into and left’ the book. In one book they came with an hot-air balloon (getting stuck on a church steeple)and left the book again with some sort of flying steps (taking one step from the bottom and adding it to the top – and this way climbing higher and away), in the next book they arrived with these steps and left through some underground tunnel, chasing a yellow butterfly. In the next book coming through the tunnels and leaving by some other way . . . and so on.