A girl does plays in her home. either a dog or cat, lots of dress up clothes, i.e. scarves, hats, I think she uses a curtain and curtain rod as a setting for the stage. A lot of illustrations
131C: girl, dog or cat, “Plays”
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131B: Military School Sci-Fi Fantasy (SOLVED)
I am looking for a YA sci-fi/fantasy book I read when I was a kid. I believe it came out in hardcover in the US in or around 1988. It was about 12 boys sent to a military/reform school, I think the school was called Kah Nagallah or something like that. I seem to remember that the story was told from the POV of a boy who was being sent to the school with his adopted brother, who was autistic. The faculty secretly trained the boys to go on a mission to a subterranean kingdom to retrieve a powerful object, I think it was called the Vroon. The boys started calling themselves ‘the Coyotes’ and their symbol was a nautilus shell with an arrow through it. The boys escape the control of the faculty and recover the Vroon for themselves and use it for good.
The book was long, over 300 pages I think. It had some b&w illustrations. The cover art was a drawing of the boys riding in a tracked vehicle with a dome through a cavern.
131A: little gnome who scents the flowers
1960’s/1970’s storybook- This was a short, very colorful story within a book of many stories. It was about a gnome/ old bearded man who scented and colored the flowers. One day he was carrying his glass bottles filled with his potions and they fell into the stream. Some fish tried to help him and there was a young girl/ fairy type character who was with him. Her named could have been Melinda or Belinda. There also may have been a part to the story about some matches getting wet.. It was written in a comic book strip style ( at least that is what my mother recalls.) I feel like the book was red and white and don’t remember the other stories.
130E: sandman puts bears to sleep (solved)
Story involved a sandman putting a group of bears to sleep, either for the night or for the winter. The sandman looked like a young boy. Beautifully illustrated, large-sized children’s book, possibly from the 1970s.
130D: Cave boy separated from family, discovers fire (Solved)
A very old book, possibly from the 50s Hardback/cloth cover Story concerned a cave boy who is separated from his family (I think in a storm) and must survive on his own. He discovers fire from lightning and makes a spear hardened in fire. He starts a family of his own and has a son named Strongarm,
130C: Series of very well illustrated children’s books
I am looking for a set\series of children’s books that have either an orange or red binding with a gold\yellow diamond on each binder. The pages of each book are white glossy with very intricate color pictures(engraved?) of various children stories like Aesops Fables. time 1960s-70s.
130B: Stumpy ballerina girls (Solved!)
Kids picture book (large size at least 8×10″) for little girls, about a group of girls, about 4-8 of them, and they are very short and stumpy (e.g. thick legs) with big heads. They are sweet and passive. They do girly things, including ballet. Or maybe ballet through the whole book. At one part of the book they might get sleepy and take a nap under a tree. At one part there might be a group of boys who antagonize them. I read it during my childhood approx 1984-1992, so it can’t be newer than that and it is likely not much older.
Another way to describe the girls: they look human but they have doll-like proportions. Maybe they are dolls?
Update:
“The Little Girls’ Dance Class” by J. Carruth (1984).
I was able to find it through https://www.worldcat.org/ using the search criteria (year 1975-1993, juvenile, fiction, book). At first I tried searching all the “Ballerinas”, no luck. “Ballet”, no luck. I was going to do “dance” next (a lot of searches) but something all of a sudden told me to try “dance class” was something in the title so I searched that and found it! Wow, I was almost in tears when I saw the photo of the cover. I bought myself a copy online. I submitted the request on this site over 7.25 years ago, and thought of it many times since then. I never actually came back to check the site to see if there were any replies until today, and I was really disappointed there weren’t any, so that’s why I searched again on my own. The other reason I keep being reminded of this book over the years… so there’s this interesting physical/emotional feeling I get, maybe a couple times a year, it feels like my legs are stumpy/stubby like the girls’ legs in the book. Like I feel like the girls in book.
130A: 1970’s Biography Series
I’m looking for a series of books I loved. They were all biographies for
about a 4th/5th grade level. They all had a green cover. There varied in subject
from Helen Keller to Peter Stuyvesant.
129B: Book possibly called Up from Nowhere
This book is likely 25 years old or more, written by a man who got kicked out of Marine boot camp, and had to wear a pink suit of some sort in front of his former class of recruits. That was one of his low points. I saw an interview of him on television after he had made good in life. It is his story of redemption.
129A: Kitten wins contest when washed in bluing
This book was probably printed in the late 1960s or early ’70s and probably took place at the same time. I remember it as one of those very inexpensive quarter of a normal sized books, with a dark olive background and a fluffy white bluish cat with a pink ribbon and candy behind it.
A little girl has just started a new school or just generally goes unnoticed. I think she is extremely shy and lacks self-confidence, and her family may also have less money that the other children. I’m not sure about that. Her school is having a cat show which seems unlikely, but that’s what I remember. The owner of a nearby candy store has a litter of kittens and all of the other children rush in and claim the beautiful and lively kittens. Our main character hangs back, but the kindly store owner gives her what is obviously the runt, a bedraggled white kitten to take home. I think the girl may have named it Peppermint.
Her mother comforts her and gives it bath and adds bluing to the water. The cat turns out to be a beautiful long-haired kitten and wins first prize.
I loved the picture of the light blue cat with the pink bow around it’s neck, especially since my grandmother told me about doing the same thing to her white poodle during the Depression. You took your fun wherever you could get it back then. I’ve despaired of ever finding a copy of this book because it was in such a “throw-away” format. Thanks in advance if you can help!