Category Archives: Unsolved

296T: Foreign college students

Leave a reply

I found this in a public library around 1971 and it was a contemporary book. I think it was set in a small New England or Eastern college town. The main character is a student there and becomes friends with students from the Middle East. In one scene she accompanies her friends as they look for apartments to rent and sees the discrimination they face. She falls in love with one of the students, who gives her a gold ring with a sapphire stone. She wears the ring on a gold chain around her neck. The book ends as he breaks her heart by telling her he plans to marry a girl in a marriage arranged by his and the girl’s family. She doesn’t understand why he would marry someone he doesn’t love and he can’t explain to her why he feels he must.

296S: Buttermilk skies

2 Replies

This book was most likely written in the early to mid 1960s. I found it in my junior high school library around 1970.

It might have been written first person.The main character was girl about 15 and I recall three distinct scenes.In one she stands looking out her back door at dusk or night and sees what she describes as “buttermilk skies.” She might say it came from the Hoagy Carmichael song. In another scene she stares at herself in the mirror before going out and thinks “When last seen she was wearing ….” like newscasters do in describing a missing person. The last I recall is that she crossed herself, even though she was not Catholic.

296R: Possibly Jesus?

1 Reply

A picture book about a girl who finds a bear in a garden surrounded by roses/thorns. She makes him a cloak (out of thorns maybe?) and it turns out to be a test and the bear turns into man (possibly Jesus? I was in grade 2 at a religious school)

296Q: Tiny Boys Cross the Lawn

6 Replies

In the early sixties I read a green cloth hardback of two boys who drink something in their dad’s basement lab. As they head out to play they suddenly become tiny.  Trying to cross the yard they train a dragonfly with blinders to carry them. Written for maybe fourth grade.

(Surely inspired ‘shrunk the kids’, tho can’t confirm.)

296P: Mother Pregnant and child refuses to be born

2 Replies

So here’s what I know about this book – it is not a recent publication.  I read about it a long time ago – maybe in a book review, and the review got tossed and I have wanted to find it for a while.

It is fiction.  A first time mother obsessively tries to communicate with her unborn baby/fetus and all day and all night feeds info into her belly – music, news, stories, but the baby concludes this is not a world in which it wants to be born.  And the struggle begins to get the baby to be born by then telling it why.

Something along those lines.

296O: She dances with the prince but decides to marry the delivery boy

1 Reply

Hi, I’m looking for a children’s picture book that is a feminist retelling of Cinderella.  The heroine is a seamstress.  She makes it to the ball, has a good time dancing with the prince, but ultimately decides to marry the delivery boy whose always loved her.  It’s definitely a picture book, not a young novel.

Thanks so much for your help; I’ve searched everywhere and can’t find this.

296N: Cristobel and a tinkling Christmas Tree Fairy

2 Replies

Hi. I am trying to remember and locate a book that I loved as a child – possibly published between 1956 and 1961, in which the centrepiece was a Christmas Tree with a fairy that every now and then tinkled. In any memory the tree stood on the landing at the top of the stairs in the house.  It may have involved a girl called Cristobel /Christobel/Christobal.

Was it the same or another book in which there was a character, a girl, called Aurora. In this book there seemed to be a grove or woods.

Both were well-written and may have been Australian prize-winners from the Children’s Book Council or similar. However they do not seem to me to have been particularly Australian in flavour. Possibly English.

296M: A machine called a “Spindizzy”

3 Replies

1960’s/70s cheap science fiction. It involved a colony that had female creatures who had evolved pink skin, and tails. Several of these creatures were featured in what appeared to be a painting on the cover of the mass market paperback I had. The main male character was sent by his company to check up on/audit the colony in some way. The female creatures were a second class of citizens who had small tattoos who indicated the type of work they did at the colony. The main male character falls in love with one of the female creatures and they attempt to escape the colony. Their attempt to escape involved a machine called a “spindizzy”.

 

296K: Scary, grotesque and colourful

2 Replies

I am looking for a picture book/book for early reading I read in the early to mid 90s in Australia. It had this man looking for treasure or gold in a cave or mine. He brought his horse or donkey along I believe. When he found the treasure I believe a ghost/whole lot of spooks appeared? What I remember most were the pictures which were very scary and grotesque and if I remember correctly colourful.

296J: A bad guy decides to kill a good guy

Leave a reply

A short story published in one of the well known Sci-Fi magazines- I believe in the 1950’s. The bad guy is able to control people’s minds. He decides to kill a good guy and announces to the victim that he will, at a later time, force the victim to shoot himself. The victim rigs up a gun that shoots backwards at the holder. As the bad guy forces the good guy, through mind control, to point the gun at himself, the good guy struggles to keep his mind clear and not give away his plan. He points the gun at himself, pulls the trigger, and the bad guy is killed as the gun fires backwards. Super cool story!