Category Archives: YA (grades 7-9)

229C: Kid rides across uncrossable desert on back of huge crab. 80s YA fantasy.

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Hi!
I hope you guys can help find this book. I read it in the mid-late 80s, somewhere between about 4th and 8th grade. I don’t recall any illustrations. It was set in a mythological land and was about a kid who rode across the desert on the back of a large crab. I think there was a procession of crabs, migrating maybe. I think the kid’s people had never been across the desert and didn’t know what existed on the other side. And maybe he had to eat the crab (or one of them) to survive. He makes it across and there’s another civilization across the desert, I think.

Thanks!

228F: Town’s largest yarn ball

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This book is an older children’s/YA book, set in small-town America. It was published in the 80s or earlier. The major competition in the town is which of two women had the larger ball of yarn/string. Everyone adds their spare bits to one or the other – I believe the POV character (a girl) brought the string from around a package to add to one woman’s ball.

Eventually, the town decided they needed to know once and for all. One woman’s was measurably a little bit larger, but there was the question of how tightly it was wound, plus there was the rumor that there was a peach pit in the center.

In the end, they decided to answer the question by unwinding each ball around a racetrack or something. I think they may have had to knock out walls to get the balls out of their owners’ houses. Partway through the unwinding one of the balls did indeed start looking notably peach-pit-shaped, and that’s the last I remember.

Thanks for any help!

228B: Child (maybe a “monster”) goes home for Xmas and discovers a secret passage in back of closet

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I am looking for a book for a friend. She describes it as a young boy (possibly a “monster”) goes home for from boarding school for Christmas on a train and discovers the house a secret passage in the back of a closet. There is a map in the back of the book with the secret passageways. She think it came out in the early 90s and was a scholastic title. The family was wealthy. The book was intended for children 9-12. Help!?

227G: A book with an alternate ending

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It is middle school aged, maybe 5th and 6th grade, and very much like a Beverly Cleary book, and it was in the mid to late 60’s that I read it. You flipped it upside down to read the alternate ending, which had a different cover. I loved it back then because it showed that bullies and the bullied are not so much different. The boy had a major challenge…to play in a school concert, it was either a bugle or a trumpet, and that was the end of both versions of the story.

I’ve looked all over and it seems not to be Beverly Cleary. I know I read it about the same time I was reading Beezus and Ramona.

227E: City boy and crusty mountain man thwart horse rustlers, catch and tame wild mustang

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Young adult book; city boy spends the summer in the high country with aunt and uncle who are about to lose their ranch; crusty loner/family friend takes boy into the mountains for a few weeks; they catch and tame wild a mustang and thwart horse rustlers and save aunt and uncle’s ranch.

225D: Girl experiences loss and self exploration in New England

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Adolescent book from 1980s: Girl and her lovely sister move to New England; the sister gets cancer and dies. They meet and interact with all kinds of characters, including a pregnant couple they think is not really married and a photographer. At the end of the book, she goes to an exhibit called Faces of New England and sees her own face among the portraits submitted by the photographer friend, and sees herself in a new way. Beautifully written, a book that stayed with me a long time as a teenager.

Thanks for your help!

224I: Cross country adventure

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A book that my 6th grade teacher read to my class back in 1978-79. It was about a family – I think they were on vacation – and the kids were separated/lost their parents. The kids began a journey traveling across the country – the thing I remember the most is that they slept in stores/maybe shopping malls…

Thank you for your help – I have been looking for years!