Hi there, hoping you can help find a book. I remember reading it in the late 80s/early 90s. It was about a child in Rome who lost his or her cat. They go all over the city looking for it and eventually find the cat in the “mouth of truth” (La Bocca della Verità) statue. I remember it was a blue cover and fairly larger than a regular sized book. It was in English. Hoping you can help track it down!
280E: Chinese brothers story (or I think it was Chinese)
Something along the line of 3 brothers, get to a meet girl to marry if they are wise. The youngest chooses to carry food, a foolish brother carries an empty bag but it fills up as trash is put into it. Its been at least 35 years since I heard it in library. Its not the typical Chinese brothers with powers books.
280D: YA Coming of Age (Solved)
Girl 11-14 who has ESP (as does her clan), has to do something or loses it and dies, meets boy (older) from moon or sky city who has no powers, but lots of technology that does same thing. They hook up (which I thought was odd for that age), and their two civilizations meet or something like that. 60-70’s I think. Telepathy was part of it.
280C: Little girl moves from crib to “big bed”
Little girl moves from crib to “big bed” It as a large sized book with colourful illustrations, and just one or two sentences per page. It talked about all the worries the little girl has about the move, and then how much she liked her new bed. I remember she said It was great because now there was room for daddy to sit with her at bedtime and give her “nose-nuzzles”. We used It 18 years ago to ease our daughter’s transition to a bed from her crib.
280B: Foxtails to Trick Fox
I’m looking for a picture book I loved as a preschooler – about 1980 – about a mother bird and her chicks (maybe living on the prairie) who scare a fox by carrying foxtails in their beaks (the fox perhaps thinks they’ve successfully conquered other foxes)? May be a Canadian book (lived in Canada then).
280A: Book about strange, quirky school
I’ve been trying to remember the details on this one for years, and can’t pull enough out to find it.
It’s a young adult book I read several times growing up, always taking it out of the library. It was stocked in the first shelf of the Young Adult section, which means the author was somewhere between A and maybe N, I think.
The cover had, in the top left corner, a boy standing on the edge of the school roof, with wings or a parachute or contraption of some kind. Down below were two boys looking up at him, possibly waving their arms or shouting at him not to jump.
The boy on the school roof wasn’t one of the main characters, though, just an oddball who was part of the local color of the school. The main character had just arrived at a very odd boarding(?) school, where many of the kids were quirky. I believe he found someone kind of normal already there to take him under his wing.
That’s all I remember.
279I: Boy builds robots that become autonomous
Early- to mid-1970’s: A boy builds robots in a non-urban area. A lightning strike makes them autonomous. At the end of the book, he tells them to “stop rowing for a minute. ” They take the instruction literally and, 60 seconds later, row away, never to be seen again. IIRC the book had some insignia on its paperback cover saying that it had won some sort of literary award.
279H: Houses that gossip amongst themselves at night
This is the children’s picture book I am looking for:
Circa 1940s +/- a decade
Pictures are, I think, in water color
Colors are dark and muted as it is night time
Story has to do with houses that – at night – gossip among themselves
Pictures show mouths and eyes and expressions on the fronts of the houses
Some of the houses are very proud and snooty to other houses
That’s all I remember.
279G: Girl living in Purdah has arranged marriage (Solved)
A story about a teen or pre-teen girl from who lives in purdah (in India, I believe) who is being prepared for marriage. She gets pierced (ears and nose I think) and undergoes other ceremonies that are apparently traditional for a girl her age. She belongs to a well-off family, and her father has been indulgent and somewhat spoiled her up to this point, but now a young man has been selected for her, and she is expected to assume adult responsibilities and accept this inevitable fate maturely. I think an older female relative (aunt, or grandmother) attempts to soothe her anxieties by breaking tradition and allowing her to meet the young man–chaperoned, of course–before the ceremony. I seem to recall the book is rather open-ended, leaving the reader with a slightly optimistic feeling that the main character may face a happy future with her prospective spouse, despite her reluctance for the whole thing. I have a vague feeling that there were some tiger cubs were involved somehow in the story (maybe one of the outrageous gifts her father had given her?) I can’t remember the title, but I think it had the word “Time” in it, and the girl’s name, which for some reason nags at me as having started with the letter “Y”.
279F: 1970s Kids Detective Book
This was a series of books that I read between 1975 and 1981 (I think). Each book featured 20 or so stories (2-6 pages long) of a super sleuth who solved a mystery, that invited you to figure out how he solved it. Answers were in the back of the book. The lead detective was a “Dr.” and he had a sidekick who narrated, and were set in England.
Thank You!
