Hi!! Please help me ID this book 🙂

The girl and her sister lived with their parents in a trailer lot and the girl took comfort in things like mom's baking days using a small jar of real vanilla beans. Her parents divorce and live with their mom. Lonely mother gets involved with religious people and becomes a religious nut practically overnight. The girl had to hide her fantasy/sci-fi books and has a soft spot for Br'er Rabbit outwitting his adversaries. The mother drags the girl and her sister to abortion protests and book burnings. The book ends with the girl and little sister staring at their mother shrieking about saving innocent babies from murder among a mob of protesters outside an abortion clinic. The girl turns and starts walking in the direction of dad's house, pulling sister in their red wagon so they could live with a mentally stable parent.

As a kid in the 1980s-90s I was a great reader; but easily scared. Being autistic, I sometimes also took things very literally.

Once when on holiday, I had run out of my own books and started to read one that my Dad had bought with him. My memory is that it was a light comedy or comic biography.

It started with an office being packed up into boxes and old records destroyed; my impression was that the MC's business or employer had gone bust.

My memory tells me there was then a sentence to the effect of "all that was left was an empty room; so before he left, he put his secretary into the shredder".

At the time - around 1987-89 - I was pretty young and this image made me drop the book in revulsion.

For years I thought the book was "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman" by physicist Richard Feynman. But I've since read it and couldn't even find a passage that I could have misunderstood to be this.

It's very possible that I misunderstood "he put her through the wringer/shredder" used as a metaphor, which will probably make it impossible to trace the book.

I've asked my Dad himself but he doesn't remember what it could have been.

Any ideas whether there is a surreal comedy from the 1960s, 70s or 80s that includes someone's secretary literally being shredded?

When I was a kid in the early to mid 90s I checked a book out of my school library that was at least 20 or 30 years old. It was hardcover, and it had a bunch of information about magic and witchcraft, but from a weird Victorian/Edwardian point of view. Like a spiritualism or the occult treated like parlour games or novelty.

I remember it had a few pages specifically about what different candle colours meant. It may have also had some little folklore-like spells and games (like reading tea leaves or dripping wax into water). I believe there were illustrations on some pages, and it was written in a way a 4th or 5th grader at a middle school reading level could understand.

I don't know if checking this book out turned me into a spooky kid, or if I checked it out because I was already a spooky kid, but I'd love to find it again for the sake of nostalgia!

Any leads at all appreciated!

Edited to add:

I remember it being very similar to books by Ruth Edna Kelley, like The Book Of Hallowe'en, but it wasn't any of hers, and it was a little more aimed at younger readers.

I'm fairly certain I read this book in primary school. There is a very poor mother and daughter. The mother makes her daughter dance for money. The dancing involves spinning.

A stranger looks at them disdainfully but gives them a large amount of money. The mother gets mad at this saying we don't need your charity. Nonetheless, the mum then takes the daughter to a fast food restaurant where they eat burgers. There is something about the daughter devouring multiple burgers because she hasn't had this before.

Hello! I have tried to find this book I loved as a child for years and have had no luck. I even stopped by the library recently and the librarians couldn't find it either.

I can only remember snippets of the plot and some of the pictures. Here is what I remember:

• Most likely published before 2010.
• Was a hardcover book with large pages. I think the cover featured the girl staring up at castle walls or a gate.
• Beautifully illustrated book, with a water color style. I thought it had a silver medal on the cover for an award but I’ve searched the Caldecott and other medal lists and have not found it. 
• The plot follows a young girl who goes to work for a very wealthy man. The man promises to pay her if she can work for a certain period of time without speaking, or he’ll steal her voice.
• Many of the townspeople have already worked for the man and had their voice stolen. He turns the voices into butterflies and keeps them in cages. The book opens with the girl’s sister returning home having failed working for the man.
• During the story the man purposefully tries to frustrate her multiple times to get her to talk. 
• One of her tasks is leading a horse around and around a courtyard.
• At one point she serves the man tea made out of his dirty socks.
• The girl eventually steals keys from the man and finds cages full of butterflies and releases them, returning voices to the townspeople. 
• On some pages of the book the castle the plot takes place in is illustrated as a cross section, so you can see a bunch of rooms at once. 

If this sounds familiar to you please let me know! I would love to find it to read to my baby.

the story starts with mentioning how it is set in an island and there's an orphanage in it. every now and then a ship/boat come to visit them with supplies,gifts,etc... the oprhanage loves the children and the children lovet this lady in the orphanage that takes care of them too. the captain of the boat invites some children onboard to show them around and one kid gets really excited and decides to borrow the boat/ship at dawn with others(i don't remeber how many 4/5??). they set sail and gets stranded in the middle of the ocean because the fuel ran out. they wait and wait and then encounter a ship with pirates?(i think they are pirates). they make the children clean fish, clean the deck,and don't treat them well overall. they encounter another kid there and make plans to escape the ship while there's a party at night. they use a boat to escape with the new kid. after all that, they land in an island. it is an island with a giant in it. also have these citrus-y fruit peels that explode when you peel them. the giant is hostlie and do not like them at all. maybe tried to eat one of them he caught trespassing. there was also an underground path from the outside of the giant's house to the inside. i vaguely remember the giant having a huge lightstick or a wand that the children use to defeat it?? anyway, if i can remeber correctly, they return to the island with the orphanage somehow.

please anyone help me find the book. i read it when i was in about 5th grade.

I remember the book was about the devils/a demons daughter. She had like shoulder length black hair and her dad looked like if hades from Hercules was a biker. I can’t remember the plot but I remember it was a young kids chapter book from the early to mid twenty tens I wanna say it’s around (6-9) for reading age.

The book had pictures and one of the pages had a full page illustration which showed her dad riding through a boys window on his bike as he’s laughing. The majority of the illustrations was done in green tones. I could be remembering wrong but the cover was a framed portrait of the daughter (like the Jacqueline Wilson books but the art style was more detailed) The story was also told from the perspective of a boy the girl was friends with, he is the one who the dad rides his motorcycle into the window of.

I think about it all the time I got it from my school library and I haven’t been able to find it since

I read this children's ASL book sometime in the 90s and it was in very good condition, but I'm not sure if it was a new publication or just a new print. I was in Florida at the time, in case that matters.

The artwork was very beautiful and hand drawn in a photorealistic style (as opposed to actual photos) with some subtle texture to them, like the medium was colored pencil or similar. Each hand sign had an associated word incorporated into the art, like fog flowing through the hand sign for F or L's wearing a lace glove (I think those examples are correct, but my memory may have mixed or altered things). The background was always a dark, muted color. There was no story or sentences. There may have been a printed word for each letter (like FOG or LACE) or maybe just the printed letter (F or L), but the artwork and alphabetic sequence of the book made them less necessary and thus made less impression on my memory.

Internet searches are only showing me things like workbooks or inclusive children's stories, so I'm struggling to find this lovely ASL alphabet book.

I read a Danielle Steel book, sometime in the '80s (I feel certain she was the author but I might be wrong). It's the typical romance scenario where two people fall in love, and maybe there's some kind of fight or something negative happens, and then they're separated for a very long time, then the woman is a wartime nurse, thanks the guy is dead, but when she goes to the hospital ship to help soldiers debark, he walks down the gangplank and has an amputated leg.

It was either juvenile fiction or YA fiction and I read it probably 12-15 years ago. This was just part of the story, an encounter, not the whole (or even main) plot, but I remember the little girl was hiding behind a curtain and the woman freaked out when they found her. Her psychic abilities work through seeing colors around people like auras, I think.

I don't remember much else about the book, but I think it was sort of a dramatic fantasy that involved journeying through a desert?

Any help is greatly appreciated, I've been thinking about this for years!

this is kind of my last hope. i’ve been searching for this book for years and it’s evaded me. i read this book around 2014/2015, when i was a preteen-ish, and i remember seeing it around the kid’s section at the library, but it was a book my mom had read before me so i’m not entirely sure of its age rating.

from what i remember, it was set during a foggy medieval time period. it was about a girl, possibly late teens, who had deep red hair and a clubbed foot. she was a peasant/farmer, only living with her dad (mother died i think?). the towns people didn’t like her because of her being disabled, and her foot made it hard to do chores

my memory gets iffy from there. i know she was taken to a castle for some reason, and there was romance around her and the prince. i remember towards the end of the book, she was kidnapped or trapped at the castle, possibly to be sent to death? something about the king disapproving the romance between her and the prince. but i believe it worked out in the end.

the book cover is also slightly iffy. it featured the girl with the deep red hair (when i say red, i mean blood red). she’s wearing a white/cream colored dress that is floor length. she has her back to the us but i believe her face is turned to look at us. she’s surrounded by green foliage, trees or grass maybe.

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to identify a short story I read between 2006 and 2008. I read it in French, but it may have been a translation from English (or another language).

Plot details I remember:

• The main character is a young girl who keeps having recurring nightmares in which she is visited by extraterrestrial beings
• During these visits, the aliens repeatedly draw or trace a mark on her head/skull
• The nightmares are distressing and feel very real to her
• The twist: When she eventually gets a brain MRI, doctors discover a mass/tumor in her brain — and its shape exactly matches the mark the aliens kept drawing on her head
• The implication being that the "aliens" were somehow seeing or detecting the tumor, not actually abducting her

Other details:

• I believe it was a short story, possibly part of a school anthology or youth collection
• The tone was likely horror, sci-fi, or thriller aimed at young readers or young adults
• Read in Quebec, Canada, around 2006–2008
• Could have been originally written in English, French, or another language

This story has stuck with me for nearly 20 years and I can't figure out what it is. Any help is greatly appreciated!

It was a short story collection, I think it had stories from multiple authors. They were modern war or science fiction. One had a CIA agent who ends up involved in a communist uprising in South America and believes the government there is faking the uprising to drive American aid money. Another had a bio weapon, and the scientists don’t realize they’ve been infected until the government starts isolating them at the end. A couple others. I had it in the early 2000s. Any hints or ideas ?

This might be all over the place so apologizes in advance if this isn't super coherent.

There's some kind of genetic mutation that happens to people all over the world (I think). It seemed like it mostly affected the adults. The story is a bunch of kids that had been left behind by the adults for some reason (or the kids believed they were the only people left and all the adults died). There's like two factions of intelligent animals in the area. I don't remember the actual description of the creatures, but I equated them to velociraptors, the cover also had a reptilian-like eye on the cover. Somehow the protagonist gets kidnapped by one of the factions and she has no way of communicating with them. I think they intend to hand her over to the other faction? I remember some kind of stand of between the two because the protagonist points out that both factions have different ways of greeting. One nods to show respect, the other shakes their head. The other factions greeting is a threat to the other one if that makes sense. In the time she is being held, she kind of bonds with the female raptor thing that takes care of her. Some kind of coup happens.

Towards the end, the adults (some kind of military) find the kids and are questioning them. I think they're trying to figure out if the kids have mutated at all. One of the kids happens upon one of the soldiers in a different room and sees that they have scales. That might have been used as blackmail to get them to leave the kids alone. And one of the kids maybe has wings?

That's about all I can remember of the book. None of this may be helpful and I may be mixing stories together. It's been at least ten years since I've read it.

I'm trying to help my mum find a book that she read over 20 years ago.

The only part she is certain of is that it's a drama set in the UK and a man dates multiple women who all end up meeting.

Here is some extra information that she feels she remembers but could be mixing books so take with a pinch of salt:

• One woman is a chef that runs a country pub (this is one she is more certain about)
• Another woman may have lived on a farm, and there's potentially something to do with a vintage car crash with this woman
• A third woman may have joined a commune
• The man moves about and may have been something like a travelling salesman
• She's not 100% sure if he married any of them or if it was just relationships/affairs

Hello, I'm looking for a two book series for my coworker. She's in her sixties and isn't computer literate.

Here's the information I got.

A time traveling drama where a lady who doesn't know how to swim is secretly taking swimming lessons to surprise her husband.

In the first book,

The husband thinks she cheating on him because she being secretive. But then she throws some kind of party to show him she can swim.

When she dives off the diving board and swims up to the surface she's in the 17th century. Around pilgrims and stuff.

Not sure what happened then.

The second book is about her getting back to her normal time.

Please help, I'd like to surprise her bc she's an awesome person.

I am trying to find a short story I read in school about a family in peril (maybe freezing?) And a mysterious stranger arrives to help. The father immediately refuses to the bewilderment of the family. After the stranger is gone he tells them he saw the man once before during the war and refused to go with him then. The stranger being the reaper.

I need help, my brain is about to explode and I think about this far too often because I hate an unsolved mystery!

I read a book around 2013-2017 (not sure if published around then or I just found it) that was a similar genre to the Roanoke girls, it was about sisters and one of them was assaulted by her partner. The other sister then tricked him to meeting her, either her or the mother/grandmother then killed him. They pushed his car into a ravine at a makeout point so it was hidden by trees etc. the end of the book you find out that the body is buried in the garden of the grandmother/mother under a vegetable/flower patch. The original sister does not know all of this happened.

I am beginning to think I just dreamt about this book as no amount of google searches will bring any clues back. Hoping it sounds familiar to someone and they can enlighten me!

HI eveyone so im looking for a book from when i was in school cant remember the name and only remember parts of the book so its about a teen boy he either had a stroke or almost drown and half his body doesnt work so he gets bullied for it but later he runs away i think then he learns martial arts to recenter himself

I remember that it was sort of a spunky, sad book. The girl’s probably in her early teens, and she has this one friend who confides that she’s trans (though the narrator uses exclusively he/him pronouns for her). And the main character succumbs to her illness at the end of the book and dies peacefully. I can’t remember the name or really anything else about it (I think she and her friend hated each other at the beginning of the book, though?)

Any help appreciated 🙏

I'm looking for a book I started a while ago but never finished. That woman shares true stories of her life around 1950's movie stars such as Marlon Brando and James Dean when they just started their careers. The woman left her small town to move to New York (?) to try and pursue her career as a model. She is very young at the beginning of the book, probably around 17 years old. She meets with future celebrities pretty fast and gravitates in their circle. The book revolves around all the famous people she met and the men she had sex with. I don't think the author was extremely famous, but known enough because of her connections.

Looking for a book my brother was given (he lost it and can't remember the title as I liked to read it not him). It's a Christian themed book, set in modern day on a fairground, the main character is a traveller, a teenage girl. She moves to this new fairground and sets camp, meets a strange boy with a cap, starts having headaches and seeing ghosts/demons. She gets a really bad headache and blows up the TV. She meets the boy again and he starts to explain. She steps in a puddle and gets electrocuted and has to wear this special belt that stops water from attacking them, the other boy I believe was her brother she finds out. And their father is the bad guy trying to bring hell into earth or something. The belt fails one day as she's being chased through the fairground, and steps out of a ride into a puddle and she dies, and meets her elders one of which is her grandfather and the maker of the belt. As she's dead they tell her at the gates of heaven it's not her turn yet her name isn't on the list and instead one of her male friends name is on there. She runs to him and he's dying after being stabbed with scissors, there was a secret he was meant to tell her. I can't remember much more about the plot other than some form of jewellery that will stop their father or the father needs it and they have to find it first. They end up in hell or something in order to stop him.

The book title either had jewel in or there was a jewel/gem on the cover.

I tried googling but the same 3 suggestions come up and it's not the shaman book or gypsy girl/gypsy crown.

I recently remembered reading it and would love to read it again and give to my daughter to read, as most of my books are not religious school friendly- such as twilight!

Thankyou

I’m trying to identify a book I read as a child in the 1960s, although it may originally have been published in the 1930s or 1940s.

It was a whole novel for older children or young adults—not a picture book, early reader, or short story. My copy was a small, thick paperback, probably around 4 × 7 inches and about ¾ inch thick.

The dog was definitely named Benny. I distinctly remember a chapter titled “Benny in the Limelight,” or wording extremely close to that.

The cover may have been a soft watercolor illustration showing a short-haired yellow or tan dog running or jumping, with blues and greens in the background. It may have been a later paperback reprint of an older hardcover novel.

It is not Ginger Pye, The Boxcar Children, Benny: An Adventure Story by Bob Graham, or the 1985 Benny: The Story of a Dog.

Does anyone recognize it?

I’m from the UK but this was definitely an American book. I read it when I was about 12, so in the early 2000s but I believe it was published early 90s? The cover had that vibe

It was first person narration, about a teenage girl going into I think High School. She had a best friend called Amy who then became really popular and pretty much abandoned her. Lots of discourse about dieting and wearing cool pretty clothes and this was portrayed as making the narrator feel bad about herself.

She made friends with like an “uncool” outsider group and stayed true to herself.
Things I remember about it:

She dressed up as a frog I THINK to protest something- maybe dissection in class?

Her uncool (but obvs great) friend quoted Emily Dickinson “I’m nobody who are you”

She started dating with this friend’s brother at the end of the book.

I would love it if someone can identify this mystery that has been bugging me for about twenty years!

In love and hope xxx