Animals run a car wash. All the animals are very rubenesque and look very 70’s (the drawings) pastel or ‘worn colors. From the 80s.
229B: Animals Run a Car Wash
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Category Archives: Unsolved
229A: Children exaggerate
Children describe an animal under the porch. Each child adds an exaggerated feature (e.g. teeth, tentacles) to describe the animal in the end its a cute dog. From the 80s.
228F: Town’s largest yarn ball
This book is an older children’s/YA book, set in small-town America. It was published in the 80s or earlier. The major competition in the town is which of two women had the larger ball of yarn/string. Everyone adds their spare bits to one or the other – I believe the POV character (a girl) brought the string from around a package to add to one woman’s ball.
Eventually, the town decided they needed to know once and for all. One woman’s was measurably a little bit larger, but there was the question of how tightly it was wound, plus there was the rumor that there was a peach pit in the center.
In the end, they decided to answer the question by unwinding each ball around a racetrack or something. I think they may have had to knock out walls to get the balls out of their owners’ houses. Partway through the unwinding one of the balls did indeed start looking notably peach-pit-shaped, and that’s the last I remember.
Thanks for any help!
228E: Orphan? girl who cares for animals in winter
A young girl seems to live by herself without parents in a small house/cabin. It is winter and her cabin is snowed in so she digs herself out in order to do her chores, which consist of taking care of a variety of animals. At the end of the day I think she makes herself a cup of cocoa and goes to sleep surrounded by her animal friends.
I read this children’s book when I was young in the 90’s although it may have come from the 80’s as I have two older siblings. The illustrations are in color and I might remember the girl wearing a red scarf or hat.
Thank you!
228C: Boy/girl/magical carousel horse/barn.
Kid/teen book from no later than mid 70s. Boy and girl find magical carousel horse in barn and time-travel to solve something?
228B: Child (maybe a “monster”) goes home for Xmas and discovers a secret passage in back of closet
I am looking for a book for a friend. She describes it as a young boy (possibly a “monster”) goes home for from boarding school for Christmas on a train and discovers the house a secret passage in the back of a closet. There is a map in the back of the book with the secret passageways. She think it came out in the early 90s and was a scholastic title. The family was wealthy. The book was intended for children 9-12. Help!?
228A: A collection of short stories with a black and white cover
My grandmother used to read this to me when I was a child. I don’t remember a whole lot of details but I’ll do my best. It was a very thin book and I believe it was stapled as opposed to bound. It was a collection of children’s short stories, and I mean SHORT. It was a black cover I think with a white border around it and white lettering, maybe some red? Two stories stand out to me, but there must have been 5 or 6, maybe more in the whole book. One was about 2 little girls, one was over at the other’s house I think and was a bit of a whiner or always trying to one-up her friend. The other was about an old man, I think he wore cowboy boots and hat and had like a long stalk of grass he chewed on in his mouth, and lots of different characters in the town including animals. Illustrations I believe were only black and white, and were very Shel Silverstein-esque, but it wasn’t his. I don’t even know if all the stories were written by the same person or not. My grandmother used to own a bookstore in Hartland, WI the early 80s so I suspect it was from there around that time, but could have been older, I don’t know.
227L: Old lady and her mysterious envelopes
Greetings!
I am looking for a children’s book from the ’40 or ’50s about an older woman who prepared for the week by putting items into envelopes that she would need for each day. On Monday she got a paper cut; in Monday’s envelope was a handkerchief to press against the cut. On another day, several tiger cubs showed up at her door; in that day’s envelope were the right number of pieces of shewing gum for each of the cubs, to occupy them.
227K: Lavishly illustrated fairies
I am looking for a childhood book my mother read to me around 1954 when we lived in Virginia. It was about fairies and lavishly illustrated. My favorite was the center fold illustration of fairies in the forest dancing under a moon that had a gauzy ring around it. It was not Golder Books Treasury of Elves and Fairies by Garth Williams. Any ideas?
Thanks.
227J: A girl and a woman live in a harem
Description: This book would have been published before 1954, probably in the 40s. (I checked it out of a public library, children’s section, several times between 1949 and 1954.)
A girl and a woman (the girl’s mother?) who live (as slaves?) in a harem know the mood of the master by the color of the horse he rides that day.
I can’t remember the title, but The White Horse comes to mind. (Not The Little White Horse.) The girl was probably European or American, and I can’t remember how she came to be living in a harem. The Arab master’s mood was demonstrated to his slaves by the color of the horse he rode on a given day.
This was not an easy book. It was longer and harder than Estes, e.g., or Streatfeild, etc. It was a novel, really, with an (obviously) advanced theme. I can’t remember anything else about it. I don’t know if the girl and her mother were rescued at the end.