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.
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.
The book I am looking for I believe was written in the late 70’s early 80’s. It had purple hard cover and I think it was about a witch on a hill? The images were mostly black silhouettes.
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.
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
This children’s book I used to have was this paperback book about two brothers who live on the island of Mozambique. Its a fairy tale story that take place in the modernize world early 1900s. One i thing i remember is this particular scene from the book. The brother kills a snake with a machete that is trying to kill his brother and his brothers wife in bed. When they wake up the brother in bed accuses the brother with the machete of trying to kill him. When the brother with the machete explains what really happened he turns into stone. Its a really beautifully illustrated book and uses a lot of deep blues and greens. I bought it in Boston around the late 1990s.
I read a book when I was a kid 1993, the book felt modern) that was about a girl who was invited to sleepover at her friends house for the first time. Main girl is white and the friend is black. She’s very anxious, one thing she worries about is they will serve something weird for dinner like an octopus. She goes and they have a good time, in one part they run through cornfields at the friends house. It’s definitely geared towards 7-12 age group, some illustrations. I’ve been searching for years!!