Trying to find a book that was hardcover, given to me in the late 1960’s, when I was about 8 years of age, about a little girl called Mary who looked after her baby brother, Luke, for the day. Beautifully illustrated.
Sorry, can’t remember the title or the author’s name.
The cover was hard back, the picture was a night scene of a doe and fawn watching a cabin in the forest. I think the story was about how the family in the cabin helped the deer survive the winter…
“There’s one book I’ve been searching for the title of for YEARS. I can only remember the illustrations in my head. It’s set in a garden–two girls leave their mom and go into the woods. They have long hair, no shoes, dresses. I feel like the book was a religious undertone of god and angels. The girls found another house in the woods–an old man gave them food and shelter. He had a German Shepherd. I feel like, if memory serves me right, the man was hinted to being God in plain human form. When the girls went back to their mom, she was very old–and they were still young. The book was more full page layout illustrations than wordy. Does anyone have any idea what I’m speaking of?? Id be EVER so grateful to have this mystery solved. Librarians and Google Searches have been left scratching their heads.”
I wanna guess the book was created in the late 80s or 90s–leaning towards 90s, but I really don’t know. Hope you can help!! 🙂
Hi!
I’ve been searching for this book, on and off, for years…um, decades now. (Wow, that’s just…sad.) Anyway my latest google search lead me to you. I’ve tried to organize this semi-coherently, but I read it as a kid and my facts may be fuzzy.
Title/author/cover: no idea.
Publication: before 1992, likely before ’90. I’m guessing sometime in the ’80s.
Age: MG (shelved under Juvenile in the public library, where I found it)
Length: between 150-300 pages.
Style: anthropomorphic animals in their communities. No humans. No illustrations that I remember.
Protagonist: A young (teenage?) male otter with a snakeskin eyepatch, who is high up in the otter tribe—the chief’s son, I think. He’s a quiet loner who doesn’t fit in and no one knows what to do with him.
Subplot #1:The community wants the loner to marry this girl otter, but she doesn’t want anything to do with him. She thinks he’s a poser, and wears the eyepatch to be “cool”. Besides, she’s in love with this other guy. She discovers late in the book that no, actually, he wears the eyepatch because he’s missing his eye. They become friends, though at the end the girl marries the other guy. We see the wedding, it’s one of the last scenes in the book.
Subplot #2: The loner falls in love with a fish! The fish cares about him, but doesn’t love him back. Not the way he loves her. She’s mostly like, “dude, seriously? This is insane. You’re insane. You’re an otter, I’m a fish, end of story.” And it IS the end—the final scene (I think) is her swimming away with her family/friends to a new river/ocean/somewhere. The move has been discussed throughout the story, and the loner knows it’s coming. He sits on the riverbank and watches her swim away.
Main plot??: A predatory bird (eagle? hawk?) is threatening…something. Either the otter community, the fish, or some other furry/scaly thing that will die if the bird isn’t stopped. But this is like birdzilla, and nobody goes against it and lives. The loner would know—this same bird killed his mother and sister (I think?) and captured/tried-to-capture him when he was young. That’s how he lost his eye. So the bird is wrecking/intends-to-wreck havoc, and the loner tries to gather help to stop it (including the girl otter and her guy), but no one will help. So the loner goes off alone to face the impossible. Once the girl otter realizes this, she runs to help and finds the loner dazed/unconscious from a fall—with his eyepatch shifted up. That’s how she finds out about his eye. Also something about a nest—the bird’s or some other bird’s…pretty sure the loner fell from the nest or was pushed out and that’s how he passed out…or something? Hmmm. Can’t remember if they kill the bird or not, but there may be a slingshot involved and the day is definitely saved.
So…you can totally see what bits of the story fascinated middle grade me. Hmmm.
Books it’s not:
— Otter & Odder: A Love Story. This PB is the first thing that comes up on google. Definitely not it.
— Anything by Brian Jacques. I loved the Redwall books, but this wasn’t one of them. And according to wiki, Jacques didn’t write non-Redwall stuff until waaaaay later, mostly 2001+.
Thanks for the help! I really appreciate it.
My father used to tell me a story in the 1950s that I think may have come from a book, possibly English. So I don’t have a title.
A boy lives in a country home and very much wants a dog for a pet. At night a metal statue of a dog in his front yard comes to life and plays with him until the sun comes up. And the part that I always loved was when my father would act out how stiff the dog would get as he tried to race back to his pedestal before dawn and one foot remained raised when he froze in place.
Can you help?
Hey Folks – Please bear with us this week. Your posts may be a slight bit delayed as we are hosting a book-fair at one of the local schools and have to pack up and move half the store. (That may be a slight exaggeration.) I will attempt to get your stumpers posted as soon as possible.
I seek a book I had as a child, a book about MILK; I believe the title is also MILK. It’s a simple picture book that chronicles milk through the ages. There is a page about Cleopatra bathing in milk in Egypt. I recall the font being a very simple black helvetica. Circa 1970’s.
my daughter is 35 now and i used to read her a book called: the witch and the wizard.
it was a rhyming book , approximately 20 pages where the witch and the wizard each challenge each other for their powers, by casting spells on each other.
by the end of the book, they agree that they both are equally as powerful, and now have to clean up the mess that they made what with frogs and such all over the place.
it is drawn with each page showing the spell that was cast on each other, from the previous spell,such that the end characters are humorously disfigured.
i would love to find it and read it to my granddaughter, in the presence of her mother.
thanks for searching.
Science fiction book where most young people make “coming of age” trips to various planets. A young woman delays making her trip to different worlds but finally does when all of her friends have already left. Book wasn’t risque, but her parents bought her a “sex magnifier” as a graduation gift.
I would have read this around 1978 or so in my gradeschool. It had a aqua and black cover – with a dog standing on the porch of a houseboat? In a storm. I thought it was called Sea Dog, but none of those titles give me the right story. The dog rescues the kids uncle in a hurricane?