I’m thinking of a paperback of solve-yourself type mysteries, 1970s or 80s. There was one short story where the solution involved a hot dog with sauerkraut, and the big “Clue” was supposed to be that the perpetrator had put the mustard on top of the sauerkraut instead of underneath it. It baffled me as a child, it baffles me today.
Solved! “Encyclopedia Brown The Case of the Hidden Penny” solved by Ross and an anonymous Lost Classics reader!
Looking for a book about a girls school who goes on a field trip for a picnic and one (or more???) classmates disappear during the trip. I can’t remember if the mystery is ever solved, and whether on not it is suspected there is a supernatural cause.
I can remember that the book was a dark green velvet cover. It was about a fairy who lived in a city and could only touch things that were alive in order for her to stay alive. She would travel through the city touching moss and plants like that. I was given this book a a gift and lost it while moving homes, it was a great childhood book and I read it around 2007-2011. Any help would be appreciated!!
My friend MJ is looking for a book from her childhood. Here is what she
says about it:
“I loved a book when I read as a preteen/teenager probably between
1992-1995. I remember (hopefully correctly) that it was about siblings
who became homeless orphans. They joined a little group of other
homeless orphans who taught them homeless kid magic. While dumpster
diving they taught the main character, a girl?, to visualize what she
wanted and convince herself it was real, and then she’d find it in a
trash can. The girl visualizes a pair of roller skates, lifts up the can
lid, and finds one. She is disappointed, and thinks she can’t do much
with one skate, until she finds it matching mate in another trash can
further down the street. She learns to trust the homeless orphan magic
and the book continues.
I feel like this book has been hard for me to find because that was
maybe not a pivotal scene in the book? It was particularly meaningful to
me. I was raised a witch, and I’ve continued to practice witchcraft in
my adult life, and this was the first explanation of manifestation magic
I came across in a children’s book.
Whenever I ask a friend about it, not only do they not remember, but
they say it sounds like a really sad book. I don’t remember it as being
so, and I remember it being sweet and one I really enjoyed.
Thanks for any help in advance!”
She adds:
“It wasn’t sad, I promise!”
Thank you and your readers for any help they can provide.
I don’t know if you’ll post this as it’s not a teen book, but your readers are so intrepid I wondered if they could help me solve this mystery! Thank you!
This is not a book but the series we used in kindergarten (1983) to learn how to read. From what I remember we would receive a new “magazine” every week focusing on a different letter. The color tones were beige and peach. The characters running through the series was a group of kids and there was a dog too. The group had a hippy-ish vibe and there was a school bus that they had kind of repurposed, possibly as a club house. The front of the “magazine” would feature the given letter very prominently and possibly a character, like I remember the O and Q had one of the kids or the dog in the letter itself.
I have spent years searching for this unsuccessfully and my kindergarten teacher is no longer living. It wasn’t the Magic School Bus which is what people inevitably think it is when posing this. (Remember, this was 1983!). It’s very possibly that over time I’ve misremembered this & maybe it doesn’t even exist?
Solved! The Meet The Superkids series
Book about a girl who is a battle mage who her head trainer is called darrian.she gets a mark on her arm and is taken to live at the ghardian empire because lords or royal need the girls to be their wives because they are the only girls they can reproduce with so she stays in the castle and learn be with with them and one of them is a dragon shifter and the emperors nephews and there is another nephews of the emperor called Caleb who always takes her for himself. But girl are being killed so the dragon shifter and the girl try to find out who’s doing it and fall in love but her exfiance kidnapped her sets a fire to the castle so it takes her a while for her dragon to notice that she is missing and when the dragon flies over head they put an amulet on her so he can’t sense her and flies away and her ex takes her back to his family and drugs her so she doesn’t remember her husband. But there is a battle so the dragon shifter can take her home and then they go and look for his dragon family so they can win the war without another battle and the dragon shifter fights her ex and kills him and also fights Caleb and almost kills Caleb but he dissappear using his magic but the emperors kills Caleb and the dragon shifter kill the emperor so they can be together and she also is pregnant. And then the next books is about their children who are all dragon shifter
Hi! I’m looking for a book I read probably back in 2011-2013. I don’t remember much but I do know it was fiction, the genre could have been horror/thriller. The book had something to do with the urban legend of Bloody Mary, I believe the book takes place in a middle or high school and one of the characters mention something about finding specimen jars in a classroom, so they could’ve been in some sort of science class. I think one of the characters was named Abigail, she might’ve had black hair or someone else had long black hair.
The front cover of the book was red and it had two blurry people on it in white/red dresses, they didn’t really have faces. I remember buying this book at a book fair when I was little so it’s been a long time since I’ve lost it and I can’t remember the title. Thanks for helping if you can!
I think this might have been based on the Chowchilla schoolbus hijacking in the 1970s: a bus full of kids is kidnapped on a rural part of the route and held hostage, and the kidnappers get increasingly desperate when they realize they didn’t get the bus with kids from the rich part of town they meant to. I remember it being very scary and intense, and I was probably too young to be reading it (LOL). I would say I read it in the mid-1980s.
My request is about a book I read in 6th grade, which would have been sometime in 1991-1992, about a teen girl whose name I do not recall, but she had an aunt named Barbara who she went to stay with for the summer. Barbara was older, and a widow who never had children, and I remember that she was very frugal, keeping the same clothes for years at a time. However, she did like to splurge on new cars, I even remember the quote, “the only thing Aunt Barbara spent serious money on was cars”, or something like that. The girl and Barbara become close over the summer, and the girl tells her aunt about the SA (or maybe an attempted one) that she’d survived. Aunt Barbara was the first person she’d ever told about it. I don’t remember much else about the plot, but I remember that Barbara dies towards the end of the book, and that the girl thinks it would be nice if Barbara and her late husband are reunited in Heaven. I don’t remember who the author was, I think it was a female author but I’m not 100% sure. I don’t know if this sounds familiar to anyone else but I thought I’d give it a try.
This was a short story I read in middle school, 5-7 years ago, I don’t remember if it was in a book or magazine, but it was not online. It was horror story about a teenaged girl who sets a trap for a man who has been abusing local kids. The main thing I remember is that somehow this trap involved making him a ‘sugar cream pie” but I can’t remember if it was posioned or if it somehow trapped him some other way. I would really like to find this story and read it again, thanks!
Lost Classics of Teen Lit: Name That Book! 