I read a book in the late 80s, early 90s, but I’m pretty sure it was published 20 or 30 years earlier.. It was definitely set in the 60s (or maybe 70s?) It was set in Scotland. Main character is a teen named Moira. She dates a guy with a motorcycle, much to the disdain of her strict father. I think she leaves home because of that. She has a younger sister. I want to say the cover is a photo that shows the guy with his motorcycle and the girl in a very short skirt.
Thanks for any help!
I love your blog and am trying to find some lost short stories. I
assume they’re all in the same anthology but I’ve dug through all the
Donald Gallo collections I could find. I would have read these ca.
1988-1992, and I am very sure they were mass market/pulp Sweet Valley
High sized paperbacks.
1. A male teen can’t get over the death of the kooky high school
English teacher and clashes with the strict male substitute who
insists on teaching grammar, and eventually goes to a state college
and becomes an English teacher himself. there’s a detail where his
girlfriend is melting butterscotch chips but no one eats the
cookies/brownies because they taste funny.
2. Two teens are junior high sweethearts but eventually morph into
being the kind of couple that looks alike and don’t have identities
outside their couplehood. This one is less interesting but now that
I’m an old it’s an interesting perspective.
3. A chubby, unathletic teen gets really invested in supporting a
local track star’s effort of running a race while pushing another
classmate (??) who uses a wheelchair. The track star is successful but
in the process sacrifices a scholarship (??) or something significant
in order to do this race; the narrator realizes she could have run
with the classmate, too.
I have no idea if the authors of these were big cheeses like Cormier,
Mazer, etc. but was kind of disappointed that none of these were with
the other Life Lessons for Young Teens type anthologies that I did
actually remember.
THANK YOU ❤
It’s a young adult book that I read in 2017 or 2018. I’m looking for a book that starts with a break in a family’s house with sketchy people and the parents go and get drugs for these people. It’s about a girl who has to get her little brother ready for daycare. She put on a diaper and tried to find more baby powder in her parent’s room. At the end of the closet, she finds a baby powder container that is a different color but uses it anyway. She accidentally pores baby powder on her baby brother and he plays in it. She laughs and stops him when he starts to eat it. She goes to school and gets called that her brother went to the hospital. While he was at his daycare, he was acting very unusual. when he was at the hospital the doctors said that he had injected cocaine. Which was the baby powder, and the police get involved and find all types of drugs in the house like in a teddy bear and in the floorboards too. The kids were sent to foster care and were almost separated. At the foster home, the girl falls in love with her foster brother and they get bullied for liking one another.
It is a “romance” but barely. It’s incredibly chaste, and about a young girl, 14 tops I think.
She has a crush on her friend’s brother’s friend. He’s a little older. He likes photography. She’s having such a hard time getting this boy to give her the time of day, and she finally tells her dad the problem when he asks. He tells her to show interest in the boy’s activities. What does he like? Ask him questions about himself and stop focusing on you. This works, she finds out he loves photography and he takes her out one day to take pictures. I think the last photo he took of her was at the “magic” hour of the day, when the light is perfect. She is sitting on a tree branch and he takes her picture and starts to fall for her. I think the cover depicts this moment. I feel like it was winter in parts. I remember more books like this, and they always talked about their school like PS 136 etc, so it must be set in NY.
I could have sworn it was called “The Golden Hour” or “The Magic Hour” but those don’t come up as this book when Googling.
If you know this book I would be eternally grateful! I feel so silly, looking for it so hard but it’s SO WEIRD that I remember so much of it yet can’t find it in my searching!
This is kind of a weird request – I remember the title and most of the plot,I just need the author name and confirmation that this was either part of a series,based on something,or both. Here’s what I can remember:
1. The name of the book was Caitlin,which was also the name of its protagonist,Caitlin Ryan (like in Francine Pascal’s Caitlin series,maybe the author got the name from there?)
2. I read this one around 2008,when I was a middle schooler,but from the references I remember in it it was published between about 1985 and 1995.
3. Caitlin herself is a high school student somewhere,very committed to her various pet causes. Her latest cause is anti-nuclear proliferation. She makes a friend named Robert,introduced to her by a mutual friend of theirs named Lucy Baynes. I think there’s a character called Melanie or Melody.
4. Robert convinces Caitlin to attend a protest regarding the building of a nuclear power plant wherever it is they live,I think in either the northeast US or Canada. They get arrested for “disrupting the peace” or some such. There’s a long bit where Caitlin is worried about what this will do to her future (she’s about 14 or 15 as I recall).
5. Caitlin has a court date near the end of the book and I believe the judge lets her off with some community service,given that what she did wasn’t very serious. I think Robert gets the same?
6. The reason I’m convinced this was based off of something is owing to the cover having an actual model instead of artwork. The girl on the cover (probably meant to portray Caitlin) has a lion’s mane of brown hair with a blond streak. She’s holding a reporter’s notebook and I think her portrait is surrounded by some others. Based on this I think this book may have been an adaptation of either an after-school special or a TV episode.
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.
Lost Classics of Teen Lit: Name That Book! 