Category Archives: Unsolved

312N: The Blonde Bully

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Ok…I’m going to try to be as detailed as I can but at the same time I don’t know if it’s exactly from what I remember or if it’s like I’m thinking about other things but it is a children’s book I read it when I want to say I was in like third grade which was 92-93. The book had a main character that had blonde curly hair and she was a bully that wouldnt share the swings OR she wouldn’t share her candy with the kids in the playground. I can’t remember if  it was that she bribed everyone with the candy or she wouldn’t share. But the colors in the book we’re very light pastel colors and I want to say she either had a purple top or a pink top with purple or pink pants. The whole book was about her being a bully and not sharing and a swing and a bag of candy where the main objects. It has been bugging me for the longest time that I cannot remember this book because this used to be one of my favorites and I have searched high and low on the Internet and I cannot find it!

312L: Squirrel That Was A Garbage Man

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I’m secretly trying to find this book for my husband.as a child and always talks about it. It is a children’s picture book about jobs that people do at night. However, the characters in the book are animals. I think he said there’s a squirrel that’s a garbage man?I could be off, though. I can’t really remember anything more than that. It goes through a handful of night jobs and describes what each of them does. He can’t remember a title or author.

312K: People Across The Lake

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The book I’m looking for would have been written before 1990. It would be fiction it would be about a prehistoric tribe that believes that although there were once other people (the lake people or the people across the lake) they are the only people left (they’re either ‘the people’ or the people of the forest, forest people, etc.). One of the main characters would be a girl named Zillah or a variant thereof. She has an overbearing father and at the end of the book she either dreams she sees or actually sees a person in a boat floating towards her on the lake.

 

312G:Bad Colors

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It’s from the first person point of view of a teenage girl. She has gone through some trauma; perhaps her dad has recently died? There’s some kind of new situation in her life. I think she’s living with her aunts? She was raised by New Age-y, witch-y types. It’s a realistic novel. Her immediate family are these flakey hippies, who have brought her up to be very superstitious. I think they read Tarot or some kind of divination for a living. She is beset with some problem; maybe she cuts herself? Over the course of the book, she learns to extricate herself from their superstition and magical thinking. They have a particular fixation on colors, with certain colors being good or bad luck. Yellow is very bad; it can’t be mixed with black. Purple is very significant & has to do with spirituality. The book ends with her on a therapist’s couch and she notices right away that it’s one of the “bad” colors, but then she reminds herself that that’s OK, that she’s going to dispense with this OCD-like fixation on the “right” color patterns & not be bound by her family’s backward ways.

312F: Rattle Windows And Shot Down Chimney’s

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I remember looking at this book in the mid 80s, so it was probably published around that time or before. It was a large book and, as I recall, every page was completely filled with a full-colour image of many inventions/contraptions, all set in context. I don’t recall there being any narrative.
 one page showed a house with all the rooms in view. Each room had things going on all annotated with detailed little notes. I remember the bathroom had a special invention that allowed a cheeky child to lie in a bath without getting wet. Built into this contraption was a hidden computer game console which allowed them to secretly play games (to me this dates the book in the 80s). To emulate the sounds of him bathing, another contraption stood near by called the “bath-farter” or something.
Another page showed a huge wheel of mischief rolling down a street with arms extending from it. These arms could rattle windows or throw sot down chimneys. Again – the wheel was annotated with many notes

312E: A Boy Living In A Village

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I read this book sometime in the 80-84 time frame, possibly slightly earlier and no later than 1985.
I only recall that a boy was living in a village and he was training at various occupations – mining chalk (?) possibly from some chalk downs, studying astronomy and such things.
He at some point runs away or gets away and falls into some sort of underground crypt where he encounters the remains of some warrior lying there with a green stone axe on its chest.
He takes the axe….and that’s the last I remember.

312D:In Heaven Before Birth

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I have been trying to remember a picture book I read to my children back in the mid 1990s. My son now has a child and wants to find that book. I am pretty sure it is a Japanese folk tale ( but maybe Chinese?) .  The story is  about a deformed scholar who is hired to tutor the beautiful young daughter of an important rich person.  There is a myth that before a baby is born, they know the person who they are matched to be with, their “soul mate”. But before a baby is born one of the angels will press a finger to the middle of the upper lip ( hence the dent in our lips)  causing the baby to forget all memories of this person.  then they search during their lives for that one person.
Apparently in heaven before birth, the deformed scholar was a handsome baby and the young girl was the one with deformities . For some reason… ones I cannot remember, he switches with her so she will be beautiful and he will carry her deformities. They end up falling in love down on earth. This was such a lovely book that both my children remember even 20+ yrs later

312C: Missing Pearls

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Children search for missing (pearls?) from necklace on beach to save mermaids. I would have read this in the early 70s to 80s, and it very likely could have been a 2nd hand book. Some children are searching on a beach for the missing (I think pearls) from a necklace. The necklace needs to be complete to save (possibly) mermaids from something. I remember rockpools being involved. This has been bugging me for years, and I’d be so grateful if someone could solve it for me.