Category Archives: YA (grades 7-9)

295V: Trapped in a snow globe as pets (Solved!)

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It was a paperback about two girls on a trip with their family and they stop at some mine or cave. The younger sister runs off into the gift shop and the older follows. The evil gift shop owner ends up trapping both in a giant snow globe as pets for a giant family in the cave system. They really just wanted the little sister so the elder is a freebie. They end up escaping when the older girl melts the snow globe on the fireplace or something and they run out through the tunnels.  Might have been apple paperbacks or similar.

295U: Ring-Around-A-Rosie (Solved)

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I am looking for a book I read in the mid-1960’s, probably young adult.  Tells the story of a girl who moves to Cape Cod? (some seashore region) to train with a famous tole (painting on tin ware, etc.) painter.  At first she just copies his designs, but he insists she should find her own muse.  One day she sees a group of kids playing ring-around-a-rosie and does a design based on that.

295S: The Holy Island of Lindisfarne

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I’m looking for a children’s or YA novel about St. Cuthbert, the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, some children, and possibly a selkie (mythological creature). The story, as I remember, was somewhat mystical and had to do with St. Cuthbert. I would have read it in the late1960s— it’s not The Wind Eye by Robert Westell (1977), which was published too late to have been the book I read. I remember the cover being illustrated in shades of gray and white. It may have shown some birds flying around the island, which has a distinctively shaped profile.

295G: 90s young adult book with a man who has had his tongue cut out

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A couple of kids on a mountain and are either rescued or menaced (possibly both) by a man who has had his tongue cut out. He may have been Native American or it may have been implied that this was done by Native Americans. He might also have had a dog. Probably 1995-2000. May have won awards as this was read aloud in a children’s library where award-winning books were often chosen.

294T: The Six

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This book I read in 1984 and was a collection of six stories of a British youth gang; each story focused on a different member of the gang. One character may have been called Darkie Bates. One of the six stories took place in a disco where the gang member was ‘saved’ by the friend of a girl he had earlier been insulting with terms like “frog-eyes”, when she hit his assailant with a bottle. He ended up going out with her. The author may have been Tony someone but just as likely not. Great book for young adult fiction.

294R: Young Adult Fantasy Featuring Giant Blob (Solved)

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Our teacher read us “A Wrinkle In Time” when I was in the seventh grade, about 1980. At the end of this book, there was one chapter from another book, sort of a promotional sample. It featured a fantasy warrior of some kind looking at a giant blob that contained the half-digested remains of many other warriors, their armor and their weapons, spears and such. I always wanted to read that story, never found out the name. Since it was at the end of the L’Engle book, I thought it might be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but I don’t know how to research it. Ring any bells?

 

294N: Boy with Toy Boat in Central Park

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I’m searching for a children’s chapter book that I read and loved when I was about 10 or 11 in the early 1970s. All I remember about it is that it was about a boy who lived in an apartment building near Central Park, and in the afternoons he and an older man (perhaps his grandfather?) would sail his toy boat in Central Park. (I’m not thinking of Stuart Little!) I think the apartment doorman might have been a character as well. My guess is that the book was written sometime in the mid-1960s.

294F: Magic Marbles (Solved!)

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This was a YA book that I read back in the 1960s or 70s about a girl who wanted a forever home. It might have been set in England. She had marbles, or maybe just one marble, that she thought carried power. At the end of the book, the marble rolled under the front porch of her new home and she decided that meant that they were there to stay.