I remember reading a series of books during the 1950’s centering on a group of young people in pioneer America I think the author’s last name began with an A. It might have been a young adult book.
A kid just moved to Florida(?) gets a job as a delivery boy. He meets a cranky old sailor who runs a marina. The sailor doesn’t trust the boy until after he sets off a siren to scare off vandals at the marina. The sailor tells him sea stories and shows him a lump of ambergris. Possibly a mystery. 1950’s/60’s era YA book
This was a short story that was in a compilation that I read in grade school around 1976. The plot was an old man (a grandfather, I believe) who was despised by his family and made to sit in the corner to eat his bowl of soup for dinner. It was very emotional and upsetting to me.
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.
I’m looking for a series about a boy who I think solved mysteries after going to live with his grandparents or something. In one I remember him following some tiny grey spiders that led him to a solution, and I think there was a scene in that one or another where he went through a clock.
An inventor who lives in a technologically simple medieval land working on various inventions including crude gliders. After a young boy who has taken the glider out is mysteriously killed the man sets off find the culprit. across the sea only to find that the true culprits are a type of dragon.
I read these books during the late 90s/early 00s. I believe the title may have had something to do with the antagonist, the Sorcerer, but I’m not entirely sure. My school had the first book and one sequel, I don’t know if there were more.
The book was about a boy who I think had something that the evil Sorcerer wanted. The boy befriends a small dragon who I think was called Rose, she was pink in colour but was always sent into a rage and spit fire whenever someone referred to her as pink. The dragon also had a companion, a stone dog who I think was called Flint.
The Sorcerer has a minion, I can’t remember the name, it was described (and was illustrated in the books) as a large beast with matted black fur, and curved horns like a ram. He is able to kidnap the boy at some point and take him back to the cave that the Sorcerer lives in. The Sorcerer himself owned a magic book that refreshed itself every few days, he was waiting for a specific spell to come up that he needed the boy for. At some point in the story the boy manages to escape and take the book with him. He stays in the forest for a few nights, using spells in the book to shield himself, he writes some of the spells down on normal paper because they last longer than the magical book, but they still fade; he is unable to memorize them either.
A 70’s chapter book. Some children are staying in the Southwest US, or maybe California (I think) on a ranch (?) find an old diary/clue from a doomed explorer saying “gold in here”, meaning in a cave or underground cavern. Turns out be “cold” when the mystery is solved.
Looking to identify a story about a family of dolls that come to life one day each year (NOT on Christmas Eve). The dolls, which belong to a little girl, have their own house – outside of the girl’s house, I believe. The dolls have a maid, and one of their legs is inadvertently glued on backwards by the girl’s dad
This book is fiction, published in 1970s. Its about a young British male who captured and sold into slavery in Carthage. A Carthaginian noblewoman falls in love with him and keeps him alive (although she always has her sexual partners killed after one night!) but he falls in love with a Roman girl. Ends with Roman attack on Carthage and his escape with the Roman girl. The Carthaginian woman sacrifices herself for him.