From the ‘70s or early ‘80s. A girl goes by herself to live with a relative (grandma or aunt) but when she arrives, the relative isn’t there for some reason, and nothing was communicated to the girl’s mother, so she decides to stay in the relative’s house and do things on her own. She cooks, cleans, does grocery shopping, etc., and tells the people of the town that her relative is at home and the girl is just doing all the errands. It’s NOT Charley or The Girl Who Ran Away.
I’m trying to figure out the title and author of a short story I read about 40 years ago in a collection of short stories. It was about an old woman who lives alone in Japan? China? I think the old woman is from America. She has a lovely garden but is very upset because some kind of animal is sleeping in her flower beds and ruining her flowers. She hires a night watchman who’s supposed to go around at night making noise to keep the animal away from her garden. She is very demanding and critical of the watchman; she wants things done just so. The old woman feels the night watchman is lazy, etc…She continues to get more and more frustrated and near the end of the story she goes out to see what he’s doing and finds that he is the one who has been sleeping in her flower beds and ruining everything. She runs away screaming and jumps off a cliff (this now sounds very over dramatic, but it seemed to work in the story.) The night watchman later reports that he saw an angel running toward the cliff…
I have a vague memory that the story might have been called “The Angel,” and an even vaguer recollection that the story’s author might have been Pearl Buck — BUT, it was definitely a short story and it WASN’T The Fighting Angel, the novel Buck wrote that was loosely based on her father’s life as a missionary.
I remember reading a series of books during the 1950’s centering on a group of young people in pioneer America I think the author’s last name began with an A. It might have been a young adult book.
A group of teenage outcasts believe they are being sent by their parents to an OutWard Bound type boarding school. They come to realize that their parents have decided they would rather have them dead and the “teachers” are out to get them. Coming together, they attempt to cope with this fact and escape their fate.
A kid just moved to Florida(?) gets a job as a delivery boy. He meets a cranky old sailor who runs a marina. The sailor doesn’t trust the boy until after he sets off a siren to scare off vandals at the marina. The sailor tells him sea stories and shows him a lump of ambergris. Possibly a mystery. 1950’s/60’s era YA book
Boy has messy room. Hoarder. Parents unhappy. Somehow is left on his own in house, uses all dishes, resorts to eating from soap dish, puts all dishes in truck bed to get rained on. Also finds key to locked shed, puts all hoarded stuff in shed, keeps room neat, parents happy, 60s/70s. Line drawings.
A boy builds an airplane from a vacuum cleaner and flies off to rescue his dad. I think it’s to get him home for Christmas. On the way back home they stop off to buy presents for each other, and they buy the boy’s mom some perfume from Paris.
Addition: It’s a picture book – a fairly short story on large, colourful pages. I read it in the 1970s and it seemed of its time. Borrowed from my (then) local library, in fact. Would it help to mention I’m in the UK?
This was a short story that was in a compilation that I read in grade school around 1976. The plot was an old man (a grandfather, I believe) who was despised by his family and made to sit in the corner to eat his bowl of soup for dinner. It was very emotional and upsetting to me.
Do not know title or author or even exactly what it was about. I read this book sometime between 1979 and 1982 when I was a preteen, but it may have been published before that. Here’s what I remember: Very dark feel to it. The main character was a boy. It had the feel of Edgar Allan Poe, and there may have been poetry or rhymes but maybe not. It was a mystery perhaps? There may have been a mansion or an iron gate? It took place mostly at nighttime? Most vivid are the drawings — black and white, very similar to Edward Gorey, but I feel perhaps he is not the actual illustrator. I’ve looked through his books and nothing is ringing a bell but it could be him. This may also have just been a short story but I’m not sure. Desperate to find!
Looking for a children’s book-series (i remember three books – maybe there were more of them), with many illustrations.I read them at school library in South Africa around 1980/1981. The style the peoples were illustrated was sort of like Mick Inkpen-style. And it was always about to boys/young men. And after some thoughts it dawned to me, that the books seem to have described economical or political situations for children, worked into some fantastic stories. Here some of the contents/pictured scenes I remember:
One book was called something like ‘the lemonade bubble’ or ‘yellow soda bubble’, and was about producing lemonade in small scale at first, the production getting bigger and bigger with more profit and getting out of hand in the end, so that the market was drowned with too much yellow lemonade. Something like that.
The second book contained something about posters showing some face maybe (?), glued to every wall in the town. And in the end of the story they invented a dragon-machine-truck, that ripped the posters off the walls, mixing it with different colours and spraying the paint back on the wall, thus making the town colourful again. It could be about elections or something like that?
Of the third book I remember little, but I know it was about a dispute among the two guys, and how they each set up a frontier/border and patrolling it, spying each other and so on.
The special thing of these books were the illustrations on the inside of the hardcovers – they showed how the main figures (two boys or young men?) ‘came into and left’ the book. In one book they came with an hot-air balloon (getting stuck on a church steeple)and left the book again with some sort of flying steps (taking one step from the bottom and adding it to the top – and this way climbing higher and away), in the next book they arrived with these steps and left through some underground tunnel, chasing a yellow butterfly. In the next book coming through the tunnels and leaving by some other way . . . and so on.