Category Archives: YA (grades 7-9)

339P: A Girl, An English Boy, And Plaits

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Looking for a children's/middle school age book from 1960s about a girl. A boy from England moves in next door. I think the setting is rural/farm community. She likes the way the boy says bath (baahth). For a special occasion she "plaits" her hair more loosely than usual so the plaits will lie flat when she wraps them around her head or pins them up. She leans over kettle/ pot of steam to create tendrils. That's all I can remember. My mom got it for me from the local public library in Chicago.

339E: Hordes of Trolls during the End Times

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I read this book in the 90s at the latest so it’s not new. It was an end of time book, at least YA if not adult. Several things happened in the first chapter but I remember it saying a woman was putting laundry on a line outside and gnomes or trolls came running down the mountain in hordes. They were described as being in a color she had never seen before but could only be described as fear? I’m not sure the wording but something to that point.

Sorry that’s all I remember. It drives me insane looking for it. Hope you can help!

338Z: Witches and a Magic Stone

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A young girl spends the summer with her Aunt Margaret (sometimes called Meg). The young girl finds an unusual stone that unknowingly to her, belongs to a forgetful witch named Lanie, who needs the stone in order to be able to fly. The witches come back looking for the stone, but the young girl has hidden it. Most of the book is about their efforts to get the stone back. At the end of the story, the young girl discovers her Aunt is actually the queen of or head of those same witches and in fact, is herself a witch and she has a pet black cat as her familiar. This is a young adult chapter book with pictures that I read in the 70’s.

338Y: Infant alone on an island

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An infant survives a shipwreck and ends up on an island where he lives alone for a few years. Not certain what age he is when some people (grandfather maybe) come searching for him, but not being accustomed to people, he hides from them. The book makes a point of mentioning that the boy’s hair is very blond to almost white. I remember this was a very tiny book size-wise; smaller than the average book at the time.  It was a library book from the young adult/children’s section and I read it in the late 60’s early 70’s.

338R: Young adult, San Francisco, Russian cosmonaut

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I am looking for a young adult (probably actually middle grade) book I read when I was younger. I just remember bits and pieces–it was about a girl who lived in San Francisco, and she was interested in the first female astronaut,. She uses her whole name: Valentina Vladimirovna Nikolaeva Tereshkova (which is why I know it by heart even 20ish years later). The only other thing I really remember is the protagonist wasn’t Asian but would go to a little Chinese cafe or bakery after school to get a snack. The book would sprinkle in a few Spanish and Chinese words (it’s where I learned what shumai were) and would translate them in a footnote.
I remember the cover being bright and busy–orange and pink, with a lot of design on it, and I think the book was fairly thick, probably 200 pages. Does this ring any bells?

337G: Fear of Being Crushed in the Crowd was Unfounded

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Please help me.  This is driving me crazy.  I believe this book was written in the 60’s, possibly.

Around 1980 I read a book in middle school English class about a boy who lived in a large city but no one was allowed to go outside for fear of being crushed.  Everyone had a tv/internet-like machine in their home where they ordered things and they were sent into the home via a chute.

There were warnings from the “government” via tv to stay inside or they would be crushed by the mass of people on the streets outside.

The boy decided to go outside and found there was actually no one on the streets at all.

336Y: Pioneer Girl Loses Locket, Then Family, Then Works Her Way To New Home (Solved!)

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This book was one I read in maybe elementary or middle school (between 2000-2006) that I have been unable to find anything about for years. I’ve googled every detail I remember, called libraries and purchased books online that I thought might be it only to be disappointed.

The books cover I think was beige or brown, with maybe the back of a covered wagon on it?

It starts out that the family of the girl the book is centered on is moving to settle land in maybe the west? I assume they are settlers or pioneers. They are going to a big wooded area to build a log cabin. She has a little brother or possibly little sister.

Before they depart, the girl’s grandmother gives her a locket with a piece of her hair in it to take along with her. I remember the hair maybe being brown or gold and the grandmother joking her hair had not always been silver. They leave and along the way they stop at an inn/tavern? Some men try to mug or harass them and the little girl’s braids are tugged by these men hard enough to hurt. That night she was so upset about this that she took a pocketknife and sawed them right off at the base. Her hair was very short after doing it. Her mother is very upset when she wakes up to discover this and smooths them out on her lap. Her younger sibling remarks they looked like maple syrup? I could be falsely remembering that. The father was very angry, thinking those men had done this to his daughter in the dead of night. The girl admits it was her, though.

They leave this area and somewhere along the way it starts to storm horribly. The children are in the back of the covered wagon resting. The younger sibling is asleep and somehow the girl’s locket falls off the wagon. I distinctly remember her hopping off the wagon and it explaining she concentrated very hard to visualize where she saw it fall. She plunged her hand into a puddle and felt something cold, her locket! She found it and tried to run to catch up to the wagon, but could not for whatever reason. The storm was too loud for her family to hear her shouting to them, so she was left behind.

She now has to go the direction she knows her family is going and find them. The rest of the book describes her journey.

At one point, she finds her way to another inn where she begs for food. The owner is a woman who makes her work for her food, clearing the tables. When she is done, the innkeeper sits down with the little girl and watches her eat the scraps and leftovers. She is allowed to stay so long as she works. There are two? other girls staying there as well. They make fun of her short hair calling her “fuzzy” as a mean nickname. One night she has trouble getting to sleep and somehow sloshes pickle juice onto her clothes. The other girls kick her out of bed because she stinks, so she gets up and leaves.

Along the way she is walking through a wood and encounters a hunter? who she is afraid of. The hunter realizes this and starts to tell a story or sing so that she comes out and comes to him. He remarks he thought she was a little boy. The man is kind and helps her find her way. It’s blurry here, but he either helps her find a sign to follow or he helps her all the way to her family. When they get close to her family, she observes the trees are all cut from the very tops. Someone explains that they were cutting the trees down and cutting off the narrow part on the top and when they do that, the trees base is so heavy it ends up standing back up by itself with a loud “thump”? Sounds weird so don’t take this detail to heart.

She does find her family eventually and its great and her father has already begun work on their cabin. They celebrate with new neighbors and family. There is dancing and everything. The mother ties a ribbon in her daughter’s short hair and runs her fingers through it, remarking on how there was a natural curl to it. I think the girl dances with the hunter that helped her? and that’s the end of what I remember.

I think maybe there might be “home” or “journey” in the title but I have expanded beyond that.

It is a lot of info but I have dug and dug and I haven’t found anything for this book. I know more of what book it is NOT than I do about what it is. I’ve looked over every archive of ‘pioneer’, ‘covered wagon’, and ‘Oregon trail’ on the internet.

It is none of the little house books, it is NOT Ellie by Dean Cummings. This was the closest I could find to it and bought it because there was no summary of the book online. It is not Painted Sky, not Sarah Plain and Tall. It is not Pioneer Girl. I’ve looked at the Dear/My America books and it doesn’t seem to be any of those. I’m super stuck on this.

Thanks for any help!