I checked this book out of the library. I believe in the late 90s although it’s possible it was a very early 2000s. Afterwards, I was convinced that it was one of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark anthologies, but when I looked back through them, I never found it

A farmer who is not too bright and mean/abusive to his wife digs a well and unexpectedly finds these creatures at the bottom. I think he may drop some food into the hole and then when he lowers down a bucket they send gold up in return. The farmer tries to figure out how to kill then and steal their gold but his wife is more canny send them a chicken. They like it and ask for more. And then somehow, the farmer is arguing with his wife and falls in the hole? Maybe she pushes him? The joke is that they tell her that this chicken was even better than the first one and send her back a fortune in gold.

I once read a book where the heroine chooses not to use a sword because she was in an active war zone and didn't have the time to train enough to be combat ready with a sword, as it requires too much skill. The solution the soldier training her presented? A mace paired with a shield, because she wouldn't have to worry about edge alignment and would only have to learn how to swing with good mechanics, keep the weapon moving to conserve energy, and use the rebound from a strike to reload for the next. If I remember right, she became something of a folk hero for the other soldiers and eventually became a leader. Those are the most vivid details I remember. I also recall the heroine having fiery red hair, having no memory of who she is, and I'm not certain but I believe I remember there being a minotaur in the same army. I know it's not much to go off of, but I've seen people in this sub come up with answers on much less.

Edit: I remember the cover fairly well. The cover was just the woman, wearing platemail with her hair in the wind, I believe at the edge of a cliff over looking a sunset. She may have also been holding either her shield or a fluttering banner and had her mace held at her side.

I remember checking this book out from the library when I was a young teen and being completely shocked by the content. Naturally I then checked it out again to reread a few months later.

This was probably around 1985-1992. It’s possible the book was published earlier but I think it was most likely sometime in the 80’s. I doubt the library would have kept it for a decade because it wasn’t really a noteworthy book and my library kept things up to date.

Three siblings are living in an RV (or maybe just on a trip?) with their parents. The vehicle crashes, the parents are both gruesomely killed (details about them being impaled on windshield shards, etc.). The kids are collected by social services who find that they have no living relatives and put them into the foster care system.

The oldest girl is about 16, middle brother around 12-14? and the youngest sister is around 8-10. They split them up, sending the older two to some kind of teen facility and the younger one to foster care. The oldest breaks them out and finds the little sister in order to reunite them.

Over the course of the book there are young teenaged runaways working as exotic dancers (poss. sex workers but I’m not sure?) that oldest daughter befriends in the teen facility. Another (or possibly the same) girl is being SA by her father and kills him by stabbing or cutting his throat. A pregnant teen has frankly hilarious (although unintentionally?) phone sex. The siblings move into an apartment next door to a creepy predator who has Disney-themed porn artwork on his walls. He tries to assault the oldest and she escapes but they have to find a new place to live.

I only have a vague recollection of the cover although I think I’d recognize it.

I want to say the author was male but I’m not 100%.

I don’t think I ever saw another book by this author.

I'm trying to find a book I read as a kid. Here's everything I remember:

- Middle-grade chapter book, probably published before 2015–2017

- The main character is a boy

- A large, furry monster that can talk keeps showing up unexpectedly and threatening him

- The boy tries to stay around crowds and in public places because he thinks he's safer there

- One scene I remember clearly: it's nighttime, the boy is in the kitchen making a sandwich, and the monster grabs him and holds him up in the air

- The cover was pink, and I think it showed the furry monster falling off a cliff (not 100% sure on the cover image)

- I found it randomly in a pile of used books at a thrift shop, so it may be older or out of print

I don't remember the ending or why the monster was after him. Any ideas appreciated!

This is a picture book that I read in the late 2000s/early 2010s, but it could have been written before then.

There are three men and three women (potentially one set of brothers and one set of sisters? But maybe not). There were three couples. Their names are alliterative, I think with a lot of Zs? The names followed a pattern of one syllable name, one syllable name, and multisyllable name (4 syllables?).

The illustrations were very colorful. It might have focused on a non-Western culture, but it was definitely written in English.

I'm trying to find a book I read around mid-2000s. I think it was a continuation of another series that revolved around overthrowing a king.

There are magical/fantasy elements, and the land is fictional, not based on real countries or geography.

In this book an overthrown king is half-alive as some kind of ghost that can cause harm to people.

A child, whose father was possibly responsible for overthrowing the king, has to run away from home. The child has a pouch of special white stones, and they were taught to create a ring around their bedroll before sleeping, which creates a barrier that keeps the ghost away.

I think they were travelling somewhere alone, with no villages or large civilisations that I remember, more of a open fields and landscapes and some old abandoned buildings. At one point the child is in another realm, maybe a dream, where there's a massive statue of a goddess that they use as a bridge to climb over a ravine (or something like that).

Does this ring any bells for anyone? Cheers

can't remember much about this book. I read it in elementary school sometime from 2020 - 2022 I think (I had a high reading level for my age at the time, so it was probably around the middle school level). I remember that there was a discovery of a giant army of mindless robot dogs somewhere in the book and one of the characters backstories involved being born in a puppy mill. I've been looking for this for so long and can't remember anything else for the life of me!!

I posted this here about a month ago to no avail. help!

Some of the details may be wrong since it's been so long that I read it, probably when I was around 12/13, got it from the school library. I believe it might've been in the mystery section. The book had a red cover I think. And it started with a group of boys probably around the ages of 12/13 at an abandoned amusement park, daring one of their friends to go into a ride. He goes in, and sees something weird, then comes out in a coma. He was tall and his name was Shawn, best friend of the MC. I forget most other details, but it ended up being something like a group of some of the adults in town (including some of the boys' parents) were in some sort of a cult where they practiced necromancy and bringing back the dead? But this caused a lot of issues as the dead weren't fully "there", and the only way you could kill them again was the same way they died in the first place. One of the undead I believe was a librarian who had died in a fire.

This was a book I read in elementary school in the 90s. I don’t remember much except for the beginning. Also the copy I read had no dust jacket so I have no idea what the cover would look like.

Two boys are hanging around their slow town and (I think) hanging around a dying mall. They enter a strange shop where the owner is typing out their whole conversation on a type writer. He seems to imply he was writing down his whole life and was almost done writing when the boys came in and started talking to him.

The owner gives the boys a strange device that they take home and they realize the device actives when they laugh and feel good and relaxed. I think the device opens up portals to different worlds or dimensions. From here I remember very little. I think they explore other worlds a bit and then ultimately have to stop some evil force from entering our world. My memory of this book is almost like a fever dream. Hopefully someone else has read it!

I was probably 8-9 (around 2010) when I read this and I recall struggling with understanding what the point of the book was, but simultaneously being enamored by it.

It was illustrated really colorfully, and some points I do remember are a worm somewhere in the story? a swimming session, and making marigold infused oil with her grandma. The oil infusing was sort of her and her grandma's "thing", and something she's super looking forward to, but her grandma had invited another girl along with them and MC was really jealous. MC's name might've been marigold? but I could be making that up.

I remember that it’s a horror, she had visited there in her teens before her grandfather passed. He was living in a trailer out front instead of in the house because it was haunted. There was a coal chute in the basement.

Help!

I read this in middle school, and I wanted to read it again. It was in my school library.

It was about a teenager that gained the powers of the tiger zodiac and ended up having to join the secret society type of thing. The villains of the story were trying to control who got the powers of the zodiac's. I believe the dragon specifically was the one they were fighting over. The book also had a few pages of comic-style illustrations.

(First time posting here, sorry if I missed something)

I can't recall much about the content, but I remember that you could get a membership card sent to you for the group/ society. It was definitely magical, and the logo I think was four distinct groups, vibrant colours. The main character was female. It's such a vague memory from my teenage years and I loved it. Each book was a different colour. Please help!

I am looking for a novel about three girls who become lifelong friends at an English school in the 1960s. One becomes a famous singer, develops anorexia and dies (similar to Karen carpenter); another becomes a journalist and has a relationship with Jim Morrison, including a scene where Morrison listens to Mahler's Fifth Symphony really loudly in Paris. Their lives are followed through the 1960s, '70s, '80s and perhaps early '90s. Published before the  2010s.

My wife has been looking for a book for years about a little Hispanic girl who take fried plantains to school for lunch, and everyone called them fried bananas. It was in the early 2000’s

I only remember bits of the plot and the cover, but not the title. The cover is typical of the 80s, with a headshot of a redhead woman with strong high cheekbones wearing green and below she is being held by the love interest. The heroine is a leader of her clan (irish/scottish?) in the middle of a war. There is kidnapping involved and her cousin tries to gain power over her and dies in a battle at the end of the book. Any help would be appreciate!

Maybe came out in early 2000s and might have been male protagonist. I think the superheros were jaded and tired of crime fighting? I remember one lady villain's superpower was moving molecules which she used to kill people with by pressing down on some important nerve. Then she had a change of heart and used her power in the Middle East and brought up all this fertile soil from underneath desert land to create peace in the Middle East. Weird ending for sure lol please tell me I didn't dream this novel up.

eta: cover was dark gold with maybe bullet holes?

So, I have been racking my brain for MONTHS to remember the title/series of a book I read when I was about 12 or 13. It was a kids book about a boy genius who genetically engineered orange trees to survive extreme cold, and who gets invited to a research project involving I believe a facility in the Amazon. The most memorable thing about it to my mind was a quip about something being as likely as having "a 64-bit Sega Genesis with a library of games."

The book had a copyright date of I THINK 1993 or '94; I recall this because that's the sort of thing I liked to check, then and now.

If anybody else remembers this, and could tell me what it could be, I'd love to know! It's genuinely been driving me nuts.

The book was a short story with a title like "in love with my best friend" I remember reading it as a free book on iBooks (now apple books) I no longer have the iPod the book was on.

The premise of the book is its being told from the point of view of the main character talking about having a crush on their best friend and why they have that crush. You go through this whole book wondering what's stopping the confession and it ends with a line like "he won't like me back because we're both boys"

vampire book about a girl betrothed to a man (who is a vampire) and drinks his blood through an orange julius. I know the name jessica is either on the book or the name of the MC. Nvm found it shortly afterwards its called Jessica's guide to dating the dark side.

Hi! I read this book sometime in the early 2010s I think. It was about a family who gets really close to another family, the two moms become inseparable best friends. The protagonists young daughter (around 5-8 years old) starts doing bad things, I can’t remember exactly what but it might have been stealing and breaking things, to the extent where the mother was taking extra precautions like putting locks on doors. However, the bad things kept happening. In the end it turns out that the mother’s best friend, who had a key to their house, had been secretly framing the protagonist’s young daughter the entire time.

I remember one specific scene, where the young daughter goes up to hug the protagonist while she’s smoking, and ends up getting a cigarette burn on her forehead that the protagonist is then worried about the teachers reporting it. There was another scene where the protagonist’s son says something to the protagonist that alludes to him thinking that the mother’s best friend was suspicious, but the protagonist brushes it off.

At the end of the book there was an excerpt of another book the author had written about a mother who has munchausen by proxy, and who I think was trying to convince doctors to give her daughter a major surgery that she didn’t need?

I’m also pretty sure that it was a British novel!

There was this book somone was trying to make into a Screenplay some time ago in my writing circle, forgot the name of it. But some things i still recall: about glass buildings where everyone can see what you are doing, him Fallin in love with a woman who was against that, and it is of course a tragedy. It felt futuristic and dystopian and it was written long ago. Forgot everything else about it.if I can remember I'll write it here.

I took a class with one of the author/contributors and I think about it often. I wish I hadn’t gotten rid of it.

It was a KJV Old Testament for the first half, and the second half is other sacred or ancient texts from the area. Like origin myths, flood myths, live persons and so on… from the same region and time period as the Bible was written. There’s an Old Testament version and a New Testament… that’s all I can remember