Kids trained to 'push' virtual soldiers on a digital (AR/VR) tabletop. The soldiers turn out to be real people. There are two kids (boy and girl?) who are able to sneak out and talk to each other during their training. I think this was a YA novel as I read it in elementary school in the late 90's/early 00's
Category Archives: YA (grades 7-9)
319P: Terrifying Baby Thief
I got a book from a scholastic book fair back in the 1990s. It was about a girl who lived in a house with her baby brother (maybe sister). There was a creature in the woods who stole the baby and she had to rescue him/her. The cover was terrifying (at least to 11 year old me) and I even bought it twice because the cover came off of one.
This creature was maybe a witch or something that needed the youth of the baby to survive – it fed off of the baby or something like that. The book would probably have been written between 1985 and 1995, young adult thriller/horror/fantasy.
Any help is appreciated!!!
319H: Teenage Girl Deals With Kangaroo Court
I am looking for a book that was probably written in the 1950s or early 1960s. It was a part of my grade school library, a school that converted from a K-12 school to a K-8 in 1965 or so. The book might have been written as a young adult novel. It was about a teenage girl and her dealing with high school life (boyfriends, homework, mean girls). I do remember that one chapter was titled “The Kangaroo Court”. I do not remember the very much more about the book, but “Pink” comes to mind – either part of the title or another chapter. I hope this jogs someone’s memory!
317Q: Girl, possibly babysitter, can occupy the mind of any animal she sees
317M: Plagiarized Book Report Leads to Personal Growth
I am desperately trying to recall the name of a book I believe I read in my youth (I suspect in middle school so most likely a YA novel) in which a plot point turns on the plagiarism of a book report by the protagonist that is to be the final assignment of the year (possibly of seventh grade). The assignment in question is simply to write a book report on any book (I remember being confused by the lack of constraints and specificity in the assignment and this felt like a detail that aged the book. I likely read the book in the mid- or early nineties, but suspect it was written in the seventies. ) At the library to select a book for his assignment, the protagonist looks over a book -- which I believe to be Johnny Tremain, though I am not 100% certain -- and notices that the novel's plot is neatly summarized on the back cover. He checks it out and returns home, but puts off the assignment for several days. Anxious to be done with his assigned work for the year, rather than actually reading the book, the protagonist eventually caves and copies the summary from the book's back cover, submitting the work as his own. (Again, I believe the book from/for which the protagonist plagiarized his assignment is Johnny Tremain but I am not 100% sure. ) When his misdeed is discovered, the protagonist's teacher takes pity and agrees not to flunk him for the year, so long as he spends his summer successfully writing original book reports on ten different books as punishment.
As I recall, it is essentially a coming of age novel; most of the story transpires throughout the course of the summer and the ten reports serve as time markers or a leitmotif of sorts as the protagonist matures throughout the summer-- possibly coming to terms with disruptive changes in his family/home life during the process -- and by the end of the summer he has, if not quite become an enthusiastic reader, at least become so adept at quickly reading and summarizing novels that he cannot believe that just several months earlier he found the task so onerous and burdensome as to be driven to commit plagiarism rather than suffer through the reading and summarizing of a single novel. Sadly, I recall very little else about the book but this one plot point, other than that the main character's home life was perhaps somewhat tumultuous, or at least that he seemed to lack for a father figure, which the teacher perhaps senses and attempts to step in as a surrogate in some capacity. As such, his parents' separation or impending divorce may have been a plot point but I can't recall with certainty. Baseball may have been a significant theme as well in some capacity but I am not certain about this either.
Sadly I can recall absolutely nothing else about the book. I had not thought of it in years, but something I encountered in a podcast recently sparked my memory of this plot point -- specifically a supposedly unrelated anecdote about an attempted plagiarism by a middle schooler of an assigned book report on Johnny Tremain -- and of the book as somewhat formative for me. My clear memory of this isolated narrative set against my utter inability to recall anything else about the book in question has been bedeviling me. If you can help me in any way I will be forever in your debt.
316T: Teen Girl in Logging Camp
Looking for a book about a teen girl living with family in a logging camp.
316J: Japanese Young Adult Story of Unrequited Love
A young Japanese woman/girl falls in love with an older man/one who is beyond her social class. She writes all her feelings as journal entries/poems (maybe in letters to him?). Her love is unrequited but she remains strong in her sense of self as well as in her love for him. The plot reminds me very much of Snow Country, but I do not think it is the same book, since the book I am looking for was in my VERY conservative Christian elementary/high school library, in the young adult fiction section. The illustration on the cover is in a traditional Japanese style, as were the minimal illustrations throughout. The book is short (about 100 pages, give or take) and small in size. Snow drops and/or cherry blossoms were a trope throughout the book and may have been part of the title and/or cover illustration.
315N: Teen fiction book, bullying, blackmail and revenge!
Hi, I am trying to find an older children/teen fiction book probably published in the 90’s. It is about a group of classmates being blackmailed by the caretaker’s son, who knows each of their secrets. They group together to seek revenge and get their secrets back. There is an Asian or Indian girl, who cheated on a test, a girl with a white streak in her hair from a scar, the bully refers to her as ‘bird crap’ and I think her name was Rosa? A boy called Liam, nicknamed ‘mouse’ and the son of a famous footballer player, who is new to the school. The caretaker’s son loves battenburg cake, which he calls ‘window cake’. They all get their secrets back from him in the end, and confront him, meet his mother, etc. I have hunted the internet, but can’t find any sign of it!
314U: Coming of Age Mystery
I’m looking for a young adult book I read in the early 1990s about a (teen) girl, coming of age mystery. She is sent to live with her aunts, in the American south, or near a desert as vultures or large birds appear. Thought this was a Madeleine L’engle book but doesn’t match those on her site. There is a mystery to uncover, perhaps time involved. It was not contemporary to the 1990s, the characters were dressed more old fashioned, in dresses, but I think automobiles were around.
314Q: YA Series Book with Werewolves or Aliens
This was a young adult sci-fi book I read somewhere in 1988-1992, publication date would be probably no earlier than mid-80s. The antagonists were … alien? werewolves? … and there was one scene where my memory has one character who had been abducted telling another “They took out a cyst, Monica!” It was part of a series.