{"id":7849,"date":"2020-10-27T10:39:53","date_gmt":"2020-10-27T14:39:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/?p=7849"},"modified":"2020-10-27T10:39:53","modified_gmt":"2020-10-27T14:39:53","slug":"347d-cruel-soot-turns-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/347d-cruel-soot-turns-good\/","title":{"rendered":"347D: Cruel Soot Turns Good"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Hello all. I&#8217;ve been racking my brain for years over this one and I need some help. I remember my first grade teacher reading this kids&#8217; chapter book to us in increments during class in the mid-90s, but I can&#8217;t recall many of the details. It&#8217;s bugged me to death for years.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what I can remember: The protagonist is female, probably an older kid or teenager. The book is written in third person and in English. The setting was a fantasy pre-modern city or town. Could be Victorian-esque, but maybe earlier or later. The villain is a cruel, miserable guy named (or nicknamed) Soot who wears all black and is feared throughout the area. I think he drives some kind of carriage or wagon but I&#8217;m not sure. The story opens with a king taking his last breath and then dying. The story ends with Soot turning good and joining the heroes in some kind of magic they&#8217;ve learned, and the protagonist falls asleep listening to their incantations. I think said incantations involve groups of three unrelated words, and the very last one mentioned was &#8220;dictionary&#8221;. The most frequently suggested titles, Awful Auntie and Keys to the Kingdom, are not the ones. I know this isn&#8217;t much to go on, but anyone who manages to put this to rest will have my gratitude.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hello all. I&#8217;ve been racking my brain for years over this one and I need some help. I remember my first grade teacher reading this kids&#8217; chapter book to us in increments during class in the mid-90s, but I can&#8217;t recall many of the details. It&#8217;s bugged me to death for years. Here&#8217;s what I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26,4,19],"tags":[146,190],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7849"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7849"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7850,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7849\/revisions\/7850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/stumpthebookseller\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}