Category Archives: Solved

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.

 

125E: Sorcerers, dragons & dogs (Solved)

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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.