Category: Name That Book Request

I’m so glad that I found this site and I hope someone out there can help me figure this out. It might have been written in the 70’s and was about this girl who moved into a town. She befriended the boy next door whom she’d developed a crush on. I only got about halfway through the book before I lost track of it but the distinct portion of the story that I remember is that she also befriended an elderly lady who she took a pottery class with and the lady told the girl that she work her heart on her sleeve. That’s all I remember. I hope you all can help, thanks!

I have an odd situation here, because I thought I knew this one, but I recently bought a copy and reread it, and I was wrong.
This was a book that was read to us during library time in elementary school. That would indicate that it was published before 1989, but probably quite a lot earlier.
I’m pretty sure (but given the other mistake I made, I could be off on other things as well) it was from the broad genre of “story about a gifted young person, told from the POV of their more normal friend”. What I remember strongly is a scene where they go to a wholesaler, possibly a wholesale auction? I assume the gifted young person was looking to buy something for their exciting kids’ adventure story project. But the POV character learns what an aglet is, and noticing that her (or his) shoelaces are worn, tries to buy some. Only, being a normal sort of kid and thus not understanding how wholesalers work, ends up buying a whole barrel of them. (Or maybe that part is me confusing it with something else, and someone else buys the barrel of aglets, and just gives the POV character a handful?)

For years, I thought this was something that happened in Jean Merrill’s “The Toothpaste Millionaire”. That has a similar scene involving buying way more toothpaste tubes than intended, but nothing about aglets. I reckon this must’ve happened since I can’t imagine any other explanation for me knowing what an aglet is.

They end up dating and that’s how the book ends. If anyone knows, you’ll have my forever gratitude! Update from requestor: “I know that a character at the auction gives the girl a handful of bike chain links before she buys the toothpaste tubes, so maybe that’s being conflated with the aglet story?” 

I can’t tell you how glad I am to have found this page. The book I really want to find may have been written in the 50s/60s, I read it in the late 70s.

I think the main character’s name is Nancy. She has two friends, one of whom is the “pretty” one, popular, loved by all the boys. A new guy moves to town and Nancy starts crushing on him very hard. The popular friend goes after him (I vividly remember a scene at a party where they were dancing “rock and roll” style and the friend took her shoes off and was really getting into it with the new guy. Nancy the wallflower watches and is sad and jealous.

Nancy gets a job at some point. She makes friends with the new guy, who gets her interested in photography. She takes a picture of some flowers, that she calls “worms-eye view of asters” and the guy secretly enters into a photography contest, which she wins.

 Looking two different books one was about a couple of young kids that visited an old relative and he sent them back in time in their imagination and I remember they bought clothes online like we do now only this was like in the 70s so nobody did that and the grandmother ordered two small of shoes I remember that in school where they went was different they did it all at home and they read this old book at the neighbors and how they didn’t think these kids knew how much fun they got to have having school together it was really interesting but definitely a child’s book or young adult in the second one was a girl named Gabrielle her dad went to Iran or rack to get Arabian horses and he bought some and they came in and then the guy sent his daughter the princess of the 2 girls meet a couple boys and fall in love the princess guy turns out to be her fiance in secret. theres a girl called peaches in it as they go around to horse shows all summer and they are in murdo sd which has the time line down main street. hope someone can help with title/author!   Suggestion: short story “The Fun They Had” by Isaac Asimov 

Looking for a YA book, written in English and published in the 1960s or 1970s. set in a London school with a gang named “nosotros”. Think they were a female gang. Remembered that was the first time I had heard the word “nosotros”.

 Here’s my book quest…a teen girl seems to have snuck off a bus or sway from a runaway shelter and lives inhills/ mountain near a sandy shore. Shes there for months it gets colder she sleeps in a cave or include in mountain.. She sneaks into a close by farm house to steal food & warm clothes. She meets a boy they have a trist. She eventually gets pregnant. She seems very naive about sex/body/pregnancy. he then leaves her promises to come back but never returns She makes a necklace to hold a pearl he gave her. She uses her long hair, braiding it to hold the pearl on her necklace. She ends up having the baby. I think stillborn, she ends up dying alone and something about the baby’s bones or her bones bleached by the sun on the beach. It was given to my by my English teacher in 1984. Could have been published 1960s – 1983. Thank you. Suggestion: A Wild Thing by Jean Renvoize

 The heroine was a girl in her early to mid teens.  Her father was some kind of wealthy contractor.  Her mother was an ex model or beauty queen.  She had a younger brother who had “issues” that possibly involved mistreating animals. 

Anyway, her grandmother (mother’s mother), no longer lived in the US, lived in Canada where there was no such thing as an “Uncanadian Activities Committee” and the grandmother was estranged from the girl’s parents.  The girl’s mom had started winning beauty contests as a young girl which was why she didn’t turn out progressive like the girl and her grandmother.

The grandmother and the girl had a ruse going where the girl went every summer to what her parents thought was a special camp in Canada, but it really was just going to spend the summer with her grandmother.  The younger brother had been on “the waiting list” for the camp for years, but of course, never got in (the implication was that his issues were more like being evil than having psychological problems).

Anyway, parents were paranoid anti-Communists, and the father had built their house (in Michigan maybe? Wisconsin) with a sort of safe-room area where the family could escape in case of nuclear war/communist invasion.  The girl comes back from summer “camp” and finds there is a handsome boy living in the safe room— maybe a Vietnam era draft dodger?  She has to bring him food etc, and make sure no one figures out he’s there.

I think this was probably published in late 1960s or early 1970s.  Suggestion: The Weedkiller’s Daughter by Harriette Simpson Arnow

Ok this is a weird one.  I don’t remember what the book was about.  I remember one line, and it’s been going through my head.   A chapter opens with a woman entering a room, described thusly: “Her nose leading, like the beak of a large predatory fowl…”

The woman may have been a schoolmistress or a spinster aunt, an antagonist but not necessarily a villain.  And I have a vague feeling there was also a male antagonist, maybe her brother, who was waiting in the room that she entered.

That’s it.  I can’t imagine why I am suddenly remembering this one line but it is driving me crazy. Suggestion #1:  the character described could be Irma Prunesquallor, sister of Dr Prunesquallor in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. Suggestion #2: one of PG Wodehouse’s Jeeve and Wooser stories, possibly in the collection “Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit”

When I was maybe in 5th grade, so at least 20 years ago, I got a book from the school library that I have not seen or heard of since. The only thing I remember is that the main character (I think a boy) is looking for a missing covered wagon from the 1800s. There was maybe a treasure map involved, and I think he found it in the end, possibly concealed in a cave. I’ve searched a lot and can’t find it anywhere!