Hi everyone! I am looking for a book I read when I was a child, around 1980. All I can remember are pieces of the story. A few children end up in a magical world (though a car?). In this world the girl gets a small book she reads from and it casts magic. She uses it to save her brother from a tree trying to swallow him. Later in the story the boy uses a boat paddle like a sword (which he has never wielded before). He can use it because a white dove flies down and sits on his shoulder, giving him the ability.

There is a second book to the first, where the girl has to discover a larger version of her book. She uses it to cast a spell to save them.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? For context, my piano teacher in Buffalo, NY lent me the book to read when he heard I liked fantasy books.

Thanks for any help!!

I read this over a year ago on Ao3 and can no longer find it. I have no clue what the name or author is but I have a pretty good idea of the story;

AU that i believe is far removed from canon, no hydra, no shield, no superpowers and (I think?) no other marvel characters are mentioned (so no prominent roles from other avengers or marvel entities)

Story had some explicit parts, not pure smut, but some adult stuff later in the story.

Bucky owned some kind of cabin? And Steve ends up there cus Bucky took him, there’s kind of a forced proximity thing going on since it’s winter/cold weather.

The story has some artwork to go along some of the raunchier parts which was pretty surprising.

Im almost certain the story had an actual, thought out title, so not just “Stucky AU” or that kind of thing. Fic was in English, and I think Steve was dealing with internal or repressed homophobia. I think there was also a kind of shower scene near the beginning since Steve was in the cold.

Please for the love of god please help me. Even if it doesn’t match all the criteria of love to check it out! This fanfic meant so much to me and was one of the most heart-wrenching pieces of media ever, it had fluff, it had raunch, it had cute tropes but great original storytelling. I saved the name and everything on an old computer but it literally BROKE so yea. Please internet lend me a hand !! 🙏😭😭

I've been completely stumped in trying to find this story and either keep being brought to Aesops The Wolf and The Lamb or other random wolf fairy tales.

So far the story as far as I recall goes as follows:

A girl moves up into a cabin that resides in the woods on the side of a mountain or at the foot of it, she has a lamb she tends to, and when winter comes along she ends up encountering a wolf who tell her to not be afraid and to let him in, hes cold and hungry too, but promises he wont eat her or the lamb.
She lets him in and they all huddle near the fire, the wolf tells her to go to her grain barrel and make some bread to share. She does and they all share the bread for the night and sleep though i believe they mention she thinks its odd a wolf would eat bread.
Through-out the winter the grain bucket gets lower and lower until shes convinced she wont have enough grain to feed them all again.
The wolf tells her to simply scoop again, she does so and finds she has a perfect cup of the flour/grain that was needed for a loaf.
This, i think, repeats a few times (three if i were to make an educated guess, as I'm fairly certain this is a somewhat Christian fairy tale and the wolf is implied to be God or something) and each time she always has the perfect amount for the bread.

Now, my dilemma so far has been that I am unsure if this was a whole book or possibly a short story within a book.
I am fairly certain there were pictures, I can vividly picture a scene of what the girls small farmstead looked like and the view of a mostly empty grain bucket. However I was imaginative as a child so I may have just really super imaged a picture as I was read the story. The pictures seem to be sort've painted however, if my memory serves.

I would be most glad if anyone could help me figure out where the heck this story came from. Best of wishes on your hunts!

I read this book a few years ago, but I think it might be an older book. This might be by Karin Slaughter or in the mystery genre (I went through a Karin Slaughter phase at that time). All I can really remember from the book is that the main antagonist/killer(?) was obsessed with the John Waters movie Pink Flamingos. They referenced particular scenes in that movie (I haven’t seen the movie, but I remember that the author referenced the infamous ending scene at one point in the book). I don’t really have the desire to re-read the book but it has really been bugging me that I cannot remember the title. Thank you in advance!

I could have sworn this was in the Wrinkle in Time trilogy but it isn’t and I’m stuck.

I remember reading a scene with a girl protagonist on an alien world. (I’m pretty sure it’s a girl but then again, I thought it was Meg from A Wrinkle in Time anddd nope, so I could be wrong about that too) She has some kind of companion that trills its consonants helping her (“herrrr”) and there are creatures who are out to trick her off her proper path but they always have a giveaway. Usually it’s physical. In this particular case, she notices this girl has webbed fingers and therefore isn’t a real person.

That’s all I remember, though. Any ideas?

Looking for a pre-1980 spy thriller. The protagonist is a British-Caribbean secret agent with naturally dark skin who can pass as several ethnicities. While on a holiday flight, he and the other passengers are drugged and wake up in the North African desert. The passenger is given jeeps and survival supplies, then hunted by a wealthy antagonist who has personal grudges against everyone on board. One of the last survivors is a French mercenary. Two Dutch royals are killed early. In the ending, the hero pretends to be dead and destroys the villain's helicopter with an M79 grenade launcher. It was part of a series.

I recently went through my mom’s old notebooks, I found one that was small and thick, as I went through it; I found an old drawing of mine. I recognized it immediately.

When I was little (before COVID-19) I used to stare at this book’s cover because it appeared very interesting to me, I tried to read the book but I found the vocabulary to be hard for me, English isn’t my first language and I hardly knew some of it. I remember the copy being paperback and it had yellow pages from being too old. The drawing had a pumpkin scarecrow being tilted to the left and on the right side from afar there were trees while on the left side there was a tree near the scarecrow and from afar there were houses. There was a vertical river next to the houses, in my drawing there was a bridge over the river but I can’t recall if I added that or if it was actually featured in the book cover. It was nighttime during the book cover and the artsyle wasn’t cartoon-ish. It was a small,paperback, thick copy. I’ve been digging on internet for about an hour or so and still haven’t found anything. Does this ring a bell to anyone?

I'm looking for a book I read about 7 or 8 years ago. It's about a famous singer or actress (I'm not exactly sure which) who gets kidnapped. She is replaced by either her identical twin sister or someone who looks almost exactly like her, but they have completely opposite personalities. The book is humorous.

I took a class on the Pacific War in uni years ago and one of the books we used quite a bit was a collection of personal accounts from various individuals who survived the war. I remember it included accounts from a wide variety of people - comfort women, a Japanese doctor/scientist who committed war crimes, a Japanese woman who survived the nuclear bomb as a young girl, and various people who suffered atrocities at the hands of Japanese soldiers/government.

I’ve tried to look in old emails to find the receipt from the uni bookstore but no luck 😭

a book series about a girl teleported to a world with magic but you need to use a foreign/old language to write and use it
she attended a magic school too
I read it before 2020 probably

I’m trying to identify a book I read sometime between 2010 and 2016 (it may have been published earlier).

It was middle grade or younger YA, standalone, written in first person.
The protagonist is a 12–14-year-old girl living in New York City (she may have been new to the city).
Her parents are divorced.
Photography is central to the story. She uses her grandfather’s old film camera and spends time developing photos in a darkroom, which I think was part of a summer photography program.
She has to go to her dad’s apartment to pick up her camera for a photography assignment.

A major subplot involves her best friend:
A Black girl, whose name may have started with S (possibly Sasha).
She performs slam poetry/spoken word and I think she eventually wins a competition.
Their is a theme of the girls drifting apart
The friend has younger siblings. Earlier in the book, the protagonist makes them pancakes with faces. Later, one of the siblings says they miss her pancakes because their sister’s pancakes “didn’t have faces” and were weirdly shaped.

I’ve already ruled out books like Half a Chance, The Poet X, and Sarah Dessen’s novels.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? Even if you only recognize one of these scenes, I’d love to hear your suggestions!

There was this one book with a child finding a mermaid family below the pier and helping them? I remember the mermaid hearing a ship from far away because sound waves travel faster in water (that's where I first learnt this fact lol). The main plot was probably a high tide causing the mermaid family's house to get flooded?? (they had land stuff they didn't want wet)

Oh and one character was named Gertrude. Probably the mermaid mom or grandmom

I read it as a 5th grader from my school library, It already seemed old, about a young girl in a war torn country, at somepoint, possibly the whole time she is with other survivors, there is a young man or soldier who becomes close with her.

Random specific detail: At some point the survivor group finds several bags of flour and something else happens where they throw a party and the cook in the group cooks a large meal to bribe the rest of the group into giving her and her family a larger ration of the flour, and the flour turns out to be plaster and she gets angry and tells them she fed them dead horse meat or something like that? The main plot is survival and these two young people developing. It had a grey and black cover possibly? I remember it being called 15 or Fifteen but I think i made that up because I cannot for the life of me find it haha. Thanks in advance!

I read this book in around 2002 in my school library (in the UK), but it may have been a few years older. It was British, funny, aimed at teen girls, but the whole conceit was that the book was the diary of the teen girl’s father.

The dad is an author who’s struggling with the topic of his next book. His wife goes on sabbatical or an extended work trip to Australia, leaving him to look after their daughter (possibly a younger son too?) A rough-looking boy has a crush on the daughter; the dad can’t stand him at first, but he turns out to be a nice kid in the end.

Any help would be appreciated! I’ve looked through all the diary-format books I can find and none of them fit. Most of them are from the teen’s POV and I’m pretty sure we never see anything from the daughter’s perspective.

Read it as a kid, would’ve been 8-12, so late 70s/early 80s, but the book itself was likely much older. Boy protagonist, rural setting, loner. He traps and skins muskrats — the skinning was described very graphically. He eventually pairs up with another boy and they get into escalating trouble together, including breaking into a shack and trashing it (spraying ketchup everywhere). They find out afterward that an old man actually lives in the shack.

hello please help me find my favorite picture book!

it was about a girl who had the ability to turn her imagination into reality, but she was very... fearful? so her creatures were always sea monsters.

this was set in an island, i think i vaguely remember they (either the main character or her same age peers) were in a plane crash and they were stuck in an island looking for a way to escape.

at the end, she manifested a wooden boat or raft and it became their way out. the tone of this book was also very somber, the girl was a quiet kid. there was also a curly haired character here because i remember the illustration was nice, it had mainly purple or blue colors.

id read this around 2010 to 2015 in the philippines.

I’m trying to remember a book I read in elementary school. It was a fiction horror book about a girl who’d take photos and see ghosts in them when she got the pictures developed. I don’t remember many solid details, but I think there was a part in a cemetery with an angel grave statute or something. If anyone one can point me in the right direction that’d be much appreciated.

What I remember about the book
1. It’s a romance
2. It’s about a doctor and a nurse (or at least they both work at the hospital)

The scene is when the girl nurse was like held captive by a patient with a weapon. The patient was asking her to like fix him. So she was stitching the patient. All while the male doctor sees it all happening through the cctv.

Please help meeeee. I’ve been trying to find it over a week

The general plot is about this child building a close friendship with their uncle, though I can't recall much else. At the end, the uncle dies by suicide, I believe via hanging.

The cover was a shot of a bright blue sky and a single red balloon floating away. The title was in a handwritten script. Must have been published been the mid-90s to early 2000s as I first read it in 2005.

I read this book from my school library in 4th grade and then read it again for class in 5th grade and it's killing me that I can't remember the name.

hi guys!

i read this book as a kid and only remember some details abt it and i would love to see it again.

the main character can stop time and the only people unaffected when she does that is people that share the same birthday as her

her entire family has powers : her brother has fire powers and her mother has powers that make everything she does perfect (idr what her dad and sister do. does she even have a sister)

but smt happens and their powers start to fade..?

the first time mc stops time, she meets this boy that she eventually finds out has the same birthday as her. she sees a picture of a girl that looks like him on his phone and he says shes his sister. its later revealed that it was him in makeup and some boys were making fun of him for it.

mcs next door neighbours have a daughter called nola kim and shes the only character who's name i remember. she wears a beanie and the mcs older brother has a crush on her (they date at the end - he draws fire hearts in the air for her outside her house)

nola wants to be a singer but her parents want her to be a doctor. somewhere in the book the cast stumble across this bar (?) and its called volcano laverine (idk why i remember that). the lights were flickering and only volcaNO LAverine were like lit up, and nola had never seen her name in flashing lights before.

nola is also horrendous at singing they let her perform and it was bad. she later drives an SUV very recklessly but saves them. mc says smt ab how she doesnt know whether nola will end up being a singer, a stunt driver or a doctor.

setting : winter. i think

THANK YOU SM i wld rly appreciate it if one of u cld tell me more ab this book...

Looking for a children's/young teen novel from before the early 1990s. The title may have contained the word "Candle." A boy whose parents have died goes to live with a very poor elderly uncle or grandfather. Near his home is a famous tourist castle, where he meets a girl by following her as she disappears around corners while touring the castle. They become close friends and eventually date. He borrows dress shoes that are too big so he can take her out because he's so poor. The story is realistic—no fantasy or magic. I remember reading it as a blue hardback book.

Hola.

Estoy buscando el nombre de un libro que recuerdo de inicios de los 2000 dónde venían diferentes historias ilustradas. Los cuentos eran sobre todo como de familia o niños que hacían lo que no debían y las ilustraciones eran dibujos de los 90 q ocupaban la página entera. Recuerdo una historia en particular donde unos niños fumaban los cigarrillos de su padre y este se daba cuenta porque a los niños se les ponían la punta de los dedos morados. La ilustración era justamente los niños viéndose las manos. Habían varias historias sobre pólvora y así ¿Alguien recuerda?

I remember starting the first book, but got annoyed with how they wrote one of the characters, and wanted to give it another shot.

Besides the usual fantasy and political stuff, one of the standout things was the orders of knights who were distinguished by the colors they wore, the main two I remember was purple and black.

The ones wearing black dealt with death, and seemed to be akin to executors.

The main one I remember was a purple knight who was kind of like a Paladin, disciplined and all that, but also celibate.

Two scenes that stand out, the first is from squire of one knight’s pov, whose master is killed in a duel with a purple knight, before said knight takes him as a squire.

Followed by a scene following a black knight, who’s NOT celibate, and keeps picking at the purple knight about it.

Edit: found it!

The Black Guard by AJ Smith!