Category Archives: Unsolved

331D: Hostile Alien Wildlife Combined With Earth’s Failures Leads To Space Colony Catastrophes

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Not sure if this is one book or a series. Earth’s first colony loses touch with Earth. Without supplies they’d counted on from Earth (food, building materials, vehicles, weapons), the colonists struggle, mostly because the planet’s wildlife (plants and dinosaur-ish animals) are all deadly 24/7. The main female character is the Sheriff, who, at the beginning, has to rescue a female friend in the badlands from a large dinosaur-ish thing. Half-way through the book, the female Sheriff crash lands in the middle of the deadly wilderness. The main male character, who she doesn’t like, goes to rescue her. After a week or so and lots of peril and at least one broken leg (hers), they end up getting back safely by making a canoe out of the shell of a huge animal (and in love).

The colony has major political and leadership issues, some gun-fueled, and then Earth shows up and wants to take over everything. There’s also a creepy guy who starts a brothel and a gambling establishment and schemes to be get elected the boss. Somebody starts a stampede of the dinosaur-ish wildlife down the town's main-street in the middle of the night, and also traps the main male character in his house with a big dinosuar-ish animal by blocking the door with a programmable excavating machine.

331C: Girl With The Ribbon

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I'm looking for an illustrated children's collection of stories. The story I remember most vividly is that of a girl that always wears a ribbon around her neck (I think it was yellow), and eventually her husband removes it and her head falls off.  It is NOT from the book "In a Dark, Dark Room."  The illustrations were simple black (or blue?) and white, with pops of color (kinda similar to Robert Bright's).  The book also had a story about a young man that only had a couple hairs on his chest, and he was trying to grow more to prove that he was brave (my memory of this plot line is pretty fuzzy though).  I borrowed it from the library as a child in the 90s (I was 5ish?), and it was pretty beat up then so maybe published significantly earlier?  I attribute this book to my lifelong irrational inability of wearing anything around my neck (necklaces, scarves, turtlenecks, etc.) and would love to prove that this book exists.

330Z: Toy Horse Comes To Life

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It’s a children’s book, I think middle grade level?  Not sure though, but I don’t remember it having pictures.  A girl wants a horse for her birthday, but her parents get her a model horse instead.  Girl is disappointed (I would be too!).  She climbs a tree with the model and puts it on a branch, but is mad at it and flicks it down to the ground.  It comes to life (full sized) and talks.  She rides it around.  I don’t remember how it ends.  I probably read it in the early 90’s.

330X: Wealthy Uncle Watches Orphaned Siblings Take Care Of Elderly Stockman “Uncle”

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I discovered your website when googling several key words of the book I am seeking.  Someone else had also looked for it but I couldn’t find your answer to them.
The book is about four orphaned siblings who move from Britain to Australia as their guardian is an unknown great-uncle.  The young people are Alice, Betty and Sigismund plus another brother whose name I can’t recall.  Due to a case of mistaken identity they end up caring for a weak, elderly stockman in the outback as they think he is their uncle.  Their actual uncle is a neighbouring wealthy grazier who watches over them from a distance but wants to get a sense of their characters and ability to cope with adversity.  He has a grandson, Gene, who befriends the teenagers.
I believe it is set in the late forties or early fifties.  The copy I read was a slim green book without a dust jacket.  It was quite an old looking book in the library of my small prairie high school in Manitoba in the mid-sixties.

330V: Children’s Book, Poor Artistic Family, Toilet Paper Drawings

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I have vivid memories of a children’s chapter book I got out of a Canadian library or school sometime in the mid-’90s. It was about an extremely poor family, a mother, a father, and a daughter who lived in a RV or mobile home or carriage or something; when the daughter registers for school, she says she has no address or birthplace because she was always moving.

They are so poor they can’t afford paper, and so the mother or father, a very talented artist, makes lots of drawings on toilet paper.

There are lots of comic-like drawings—I remember one which had a fork and peas in two panels, the first captioned “unsteady fork, steady peas” and the next with the peas falling off labelled “steady fork, unsteady peas.”

At one point, the daughter gets a letter sent to her with a drawing (reproduced in the book)—right side up it looks like a toucan, upside down it’s a man sitting on a toilet.

330U: Alligators (And Other Disappointing Pets)

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I think it’s called something like “Alligators Don’t Make Great Pets,” and it has silly descriptions and illustrations of many animals that would not make good pets. I think the child might choose a dog at the end? I checked this book out from the library in the mid-1980s. I’ve been searching for this book for years and would LOVE to find it. Hope you can help.

330S: Boy Bitten By Burro, Burro Arrested

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My grandmother used to read to me an illustrated children's book - hardback- small book - (about the size of Peter Rabbit). The plot was about a little boy who tried to give a cute burro a carrot but he got bitten by accident. The police came and arrested the burro. She read it to me in the early 1960’s but the book seemed pretty old. It may have been from the 1930-1940 time period. I want to read it to my grandsons! Thank you!