Category Archives: Unsolved

379G: Himalayan journey?

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I wonder if you could help me find a book.    It’s one I read as a teenager, but it could have been older than that (I’m 40). It’s a book about a girl and it’s set somewhere like the Himalayas maybe? I know she ends up in India at some point, I’m pretty sure it mentioned the Ganges. She basically goes on some journey. She has a guide, not sure if it’s a familiar or a spirit guide, but it’s a snow leopard that she can talk to. She does battle with a figure of Kali, and Kali bites her hand off. I remember the description of Kali’s foul, rotten breath. Then she sort of manifests a spirit hand. I remember that she treats someone for a fever, and imagines pulling the fever out through the top of the person’s head and rolling it like a ball of yarn. She doesn’t know what to do with it, if she throws it away it might find another person. So she crushes it in her spirit hand.   It’s a lot of specific information but I’ve never been able to find it.

379D: Supernatural Entity in the House

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Middle grade standalone chapter book that I read at some point in the 90’s, in my teacher’s classroom library. This was a parochial Catholic school  and I was surprised and delighted to find something so occult. The book was blue with something white on the cover and it was a shorter title. In the book, a teenaged girl in a large isolated house in the country is contacted (via ESP? Dreams?) by a supernatural entity that is slowly revealed to be evil. It might have some connection with ice, and is male. There is some specific danger to the protagonist’s baby sister. At first the protagonist’s parents and the nanny do not believe her but at some point the nanny seems to come around. The once scene I remember is the nanny standing in a full bathtub while the tap overflows into the hallway, while holding the baby, because the supernatural entity was physically manifesting inside the house and the nanny thought the water would protect them. Its possible the evil entity lives at the bottom of the garden? I think the author was female? 
Finally, my school had a lot of books published by Scholastic.
I’ve been trying to remember this book for 30 years, I hope you know it!

379C: Mystery, “The Dove” by Wilson Tucker?

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I am looking for a mystery that I last read in 1958. It was hardcover, grayish in color and MOST OF ALL it had a small embossed GOLD DOVE on the upper half of front cover. The story ended in a cemetary with the identity and capture of the killer. The story by author Wilson Tucker “The Dove” comes very close to fitting this description but the 1st edition cover is not in any way the same. I thought the my description might be another book altogether but so far it seems it might just be another later edition. The original publishers were the RHINEHARDT pub co. USA and the CASSELL and co. of London UK.  Lastly and again I am absolutely-beyond a shadow of doubt-positive about that small gold dove on a gray hardcover.  I have been looking for some 44 years for this particular hardcover but no luck.

379B: British 1960s or 1970s YA book about a teenage adopted girl

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My sister and I each read this as a hardback (Oxford??) library book. I read it in the 1970s when I was in early secondary school, and it felt pretty recent and ‘realistic’ at the time. It was definitely set in the UK.

SPOILERS. The girl overhears her mother speaking. The girl has recently misbehaved in some way and she hears her mother criticise her and say that she’s just like her ‘real mother’. She’s discovering that she’s adopted, and her adoptive mother knows her biological mother.

Eventually the girl discovers that her mother’s younger sister is her biological mother.

The girl is upset by the discovery but is helped by her grandmother, as their relationship hasn’t changed.

The aunt/birth mother had babysat the adopted girl and her sister when they were babies. The adoptive mother reminisces about how, when the aunt/birth mother babysat, the adopted girl missed the adoptive mother much more than the other child had.

378W: Duel for Volrathia?

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I’m looking for a book with the title, if I remember correctly, “Duel for Volrathia.” It was a book to teach children how to program computers using the BASIC programming language. 
I think it had a red border on the cover, hardback, about 9×12″.
The book told a story of a boy and a robot that traveled to the planet Volrathia, who then use computer programming to solve different puzzles and progress through the story. It was all quite clever because of the lack of formality; the reader was on an adventure! The story (and programming exercises) climaxed in a showdown between the reader and the giant war computer of Volrathia, which plays Tic-Tac-Toe.
I can’t find any record of the book, neither with the library where I grew up, nor with the Library of Congress. Any help would be appreciated!

378V: Have you ever heard of a book with a chapter the E-A-Gool giant

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I can’t find any specific reference to a book with a chapter titled “E-A-Gool Giant” or featuring a giant by that name in the sources I have access to. The search query seems to point toward texts about giants, but none directly match “E-A-Gool.” It’s possible the name or title is misspelled, or it could be from a niche or obscure work not widely documented.
Some relevant books on giants include The Book of Giants from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which expands on the Genesis narrative about the Nephilim and Watchers, but there’s no mention of an “E-A-Gool” in its fragments. Similarly, Edna Ferber’s Giant and other works like The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro or A Book of Giants by Ruth Manning-Sanders don’t reference this term.