Category Archives: YA (grades 7-9)

237B: Companion Novels from the 80s: The Victim’s Perspective, The Bully’s Perspective (Solved)

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In the early 90s or late 80s, I remember reading two novels for kids. They were both about a boy being bullied. One was from the perspective of the victim and one from the perspective of the bully. I can’t find them anywhere. The only other detail I can remember is that some of the bullying took place in the neighborhood. It’s a fuzzy memory and maybe I dreamed it. Maybe it was only a chapter or two in the same book even. I was sure it was Blume or Cleary but I searched their books and couldn’t find anything like this. I do know that Wonder has a new companion novel from the perspective of the bully but this is clearly different. Thanks!

236E: Boy with special power

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Book I can’t remember details of:
Genre: Fiction/Fantasy (Most likely young adult/teen fiction)
Time Read: 5-7 years ago
May have been a paperback
Plot points: Main character is a boy, found/kidnapped after some tragedy (burning village?).
Kidnappers include a pair of twins? that have some sort of snake/venom/acid power.
They are encountered and defeated by another group of twins, who can control lightning or something like that.
(big time gap missing in memory)
Boy is taken to some sort of fortress/academy/institution and trained to fight, and ride large raptors?/bulls? which he enjoys a lot as he understands/knows a lot about them
He makes a rival out of his roommate or a rival is picked for him from one of the boys at the academy, not sure which. They get in fights (I think?).
There is a spot out in the training field of the academy with two buildings, one of them being a black isolation sort of box where people go in and experience things that terrify them and come out determined not to mess up again.
There is a test at some point where the boy has to travel through a very foggy area with a bunch of dangerous creatures to an old abandoned tower.
To graduate the academy there is a crucible/gauntlet/arena where he has to kill/defeat his teacher.
There is a love interest? who is the princess?(maybe) of a nation of people with beast powers.
In this book world there are people with powers that come from bloodlines and/or animals and/or eye colours and the powers generally stay within the kingdoms they originated from.
There is a character in some part of the book from a royal family that pushed their sibling/infant sibling/ or the heir to some throne from a window causing a severe injury which can be healed by the main character or something like that.
The main character has a power that allows them to view things from long distances, invade people’s minds, see spirits?(maybe), and other things like that.
Main character is maybe/likely an orphan, some part of the book involves a revealing of who exactly his parents (Father specifically) were.

234F: 1980s book that features child abuse

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Looking for a YA novel, 1980s, title and author unknown. About a girl living with a neglectful/abusive mother. In one scene, her mom leaves her alone in the house for days with no food (may or may not have locked her in) and when she comes home, tosses some groceries at the girl, who opens a can of spaghettios (or similar food) and the girl eats the contents of the can ravenously while the mom calls her an animal. I think the girl takes up painting (with watercolors?) under the tutelage of a neighbor. Title might include words like house (of)…, child (of)…, glass, light.

233C: A series follows a young girl to adulthood (Solved)

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The main character, Jennifer? Jennie? Jenny? Possibly on the farm could’ve been the first.
These were a series of chapter books featuring an American girl who (moves?) to the country, detailing her charming life on a farm. There were several from when she was about 6-8 to almost 20 I believe. There were animal characters, a boy she might have married, various family members. She takes up ballet in later books. She wears her hair in looped braids. I read these as a child in the 80’s but they were clearly written much earlier. I would say 40’s or 50’s. Possibly 30’s or 60’s but doubtful.

I would so very much love to find them for my own daughter! I adored these- not only because she had the same name as me. I remember being even fonder of them than the Betsy Tacy books. In a way they were in between those and the Little House stories. Set the stage for Anne of Green Gables. So curious to know why they’ve disappeared!

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.