I read this book in the late 70’s on tape, so no cover detail is available. April is a teenager learning to cope with her mother’s mental illness.
266B: A teenager struggles with mother’s mental illness
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Category Archives: YA (grades 7-9)
265E: A girl wants to be an investigative reporter (Solved)
I’m looking for a book that I would have read no later than 1992. It was almost certainly published in the mid/late 80s or very early 90’s. A light, funny YA (possibly upper-middle grade or tween) book in the vein of Ellen Conford or Paula Danziger, although I don’t believe it was actually by either of them. The version I read was a hardcover, with an illustrated cover that was more cartoonish than realistic. I believe the cover features a girl in a dumpster or garbage can, although it’s possible that was just an episode in the book that I’m conflating with the cover in my memory.
It’s about a girl who wants to be an investigative reporter. She’s working for the school newspaper and begins to uncover some kind of light mystery. (Not a murder or anything like that.) The most specific thing that sticks out in my mind is that the girl and her friend use a lot of lingo and abbreviations in casual conversation, including the shorthand “L.L.A.” to mean “lifelong ambition.”
I believe the title has the girl’s name in it. I feel like the title might have a similar construction to Otherwise Known As Sheila the Great, although it’s obviously not that book. The book is also not Buffalo Brenda by Jill Pinkwater. Anyway, it’s driving me crazy. (I still think about my L.L.A.’s all the time.) Please help me put this to rest!
265D: Waiting for love
I’m looking for a book I started to read in the late 70’s about a girl (maybe called Margaret) and an older boy. He writes her a letter saying that he cares for her, but will wait until she grows up. She may be in high school and he’s in college?
265A: A boy lives in the rural south after WWII
It was a young person’s book which I read when I was 10 or 12 years old in Canada. It would have been in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s when I found it in our school library. It was set in the Southern USA and I think that the period was shortly after WWII. The book was the story of a boy that was staying with a family in a big old rural home. There was something about hunting raccoons at night with dogs. I think there was actually quite a bit about the dogs and something sad happened to one of them. There was something about hearing trains running in the distance at night. There was something sad associated with this (maybe to do with the dogs?). The family had a black (I think) cook with whom the boy spent considerable time. She was rather nurturing. And a WWII vet who was rather troubled would come to the back/kitchen door and she would give him food. I think that the boy was afraid of him. My recollection is that it was a rather haunting, sentimental, sad and yet hopeful story. I think that the boy was trying to determine how he fit into the world.
264F: Seeking 1970s Dystopian Novella
Read this in 1993. From what I remember of the paperback cover, it was likely published in the 1970s, but possibly 1980s. A futuristic society records their citizens’ dreams (through their pillows?) and if your number is announced that means your dream will be broadcast to the entire community the next morning. If your dream is somehow controversial or doesn’t fall in line with community standards and teachings, you may be sent for reeducation/punishment. An adolescent/young teenage girl is the narrator. She is super concerned her crush may be revealed in her dreams. It was less than 200 pages. Probably intended for a young adult audience, but couldn’t say for sure.
264B: 60’s Two Girls Living on Opposite sides of a River
I had a book when I was a young person (10 to 12 year old maybe) in the 60’s, where there were two girls living with their respective families on either side of a river. It was written from the perspective of one of the girls, whom I think was poorer than the family on the other side, and she always looked on the other girl’s life with envy. I cannot remember the event that led to her ending up on the other side of the river and living with the other family but when this happened she was then in a position of looking across the river at her own family, missing them and realising the folly of her original yearnings. I have a feeling it may have been a Christian book – maybe Sunday school prize but I’m not certain about that. Any light shed on the name of the book would be appreciated.
PS, someone elsewhere suggested “We Live by the River” by Lois Lenski but this is not it.
260C: Older Teen Romance Book
I want to say this book was set in the 1950s – I read it as a child in the 1970s – part of the collection of young adult books at the Jonesboro Library in Jonesboro, AR.
It was about a young teen girl who was plump and had some skin problems. She had an older sister who was slender. I remember one specific scene – the younger girl was eating a tuna salad sandwich for lunch and her sister told her she shouldn’t eat that because it was bad for her skin. She was going to do her usual sneering retort, but instead she asked her sister what she should eat instead – what she was having? The younger sister started paying more attention to her appearance. She met a boy who was new in town – her parents invited his parents over for dinner (I think they worked together). She put on too much of her sister’s makeup and borrowed heels and made a grand entrance to the dinner. Her parents were horrified and sent her back upstairs to change, so she was humiliated. The boy actually did like her already, but she didn’t have any self-confidence. Over the summer she started eating better and slimmed up. She eventually ended up with the boy who said he’d liked her all along.
258E: He activated a fire salamander and burnt the lot
YA novel, read it in 1990s. There was a shaman-like creature, something like a mole, and in the end there was a kind of lost civilisation (something to do with Atlantis), and he activated a fire salamander and burnt the lot (p.s. not the Psammead).
258D: Brother and sister make a perilous journey
The book I’m searching for is one I read as a girl. It was an old book then. I was reading it in the early 1950’s.
All I recall of it was a story of a brother and sister who had to make a perilous journey by foot, crossing a mountain range somewhere in Europe. They had the help of a kindly woman who sewed coins for the trip into the darts of the sister’s dress. This was so no one would steal their money. After they left her they made it to safety on the other side of the mountains.
The book was a standard size hardback, with a faded cover, as I remember it. I borrowed it several times from my aunt, who treasured the book.
258A: How to Cook a Coot
I am looking for a paperback book of humorous anecdotes published in the late 1960s; the book was possibly intended for a young teen or young adult audience. One of the stories was “How to Cook a Coot.” I read it as a Boy Scout about 1969 or 1970.