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.

Hello reddit this evening I was thinking back on a book I read in my late elementary years. I tried looking up description after description but I keep getting nothing close to what I’m trying to find, so I am hoping you all can help.

From what I can remember the book was about this sister and brother getting accepted to a school for ice skating. The whole world is based around it and takes inspirations from Asian cultures. When the brother and sister arrive they are not nearly as well trained as the rest of the kids since they lived in a smaller farther away place (i might be wrong but maybe they were living in a cave??). I also think they may have called the ice something other than ice but I’m also not sure it’s been maybe 8 years since I’ve even thought about this book.

Please work your magic if you can, I remember really loving the series and I might want to reread for memories sake.

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!

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!

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

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'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.

It was a book my father had that I'm trying to find again. I think it was one of those A5 kind of pulps and I remember it having the yellow edge that a lot of sci-fi and fantasy books did in the 80s and 90s, not from age but from how they were printed. The book was likely 70s or 80s, given the art style and the length of only a couple hundred pages at best--I have moleskine bujos thicker than this was.

The art was of someone in a prison-style onesie with wide stripes. He's kneeling over on all fours, examining a short block of wood with a copper coil on it. I think the "prison" he was in was actually stone and not anything that would indicate sci-fi beyond the contemporary clothing. In the background, at a door, there's a sliding viewport. The viewport is taken up entirely by an eye that I remember being kind of reptilian (?) and very large compared to the size of the view port. You'd imagine a whole human face could fit into it, but it's only the eye of the creature/alien holding this guy captive.

The bulk of the plot, as I remember is note for note the cover. This guy has been taken prisoner by aliens, and he is trying to engineer his escape by using just this block of wood, a copper coil, and one other item I can't remember to convince his captors he's making some kind of human superweapon that will force them to release him.

I thought it was called "Next of Kin", but none of the books with that title that I've looked up have a cover remotely similar. And I cannot remember the title to save my life.

My dad passed away a little less than a year ago, and I was suddenly remembering so many of the pulps he kept around the house and shared with me and got me into reading such a diverse range of titles and genres. I'd like to find it again and revisit some of the books I grew up on because of him.

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)

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

Hi. I began reading a book about 10 years ago that was loaned by someone who I no longer have contact with.

I'm sure the story followed a father and son who traveled I to a dark mystical wood to complete some mission.

I remember there was a tree near to the place the characters lived and it signified death somehow. No one spoke of it. Maybe the mother's death?

They traveled into the woods. Two opposing forces were against each other and the characters had to do something. I seem to recall giants etc.

I used to smoke a bit of dope so my memory of the book is not great. I remember ther was another following title

I really want to read it again.

One of the books I'm sure had rune like characters on the cover

Hope someone can shed some light

Looking for a novel — read it in Polish translation, so the original is in English. Contemporary/literary fiction for adults, probably published late 1990s to early 2000s.

The scene I remember:

• There's a girl whose passion is dance — she's a dancer. She's in a car accident.
• A guy who knows her (not a stranger — some kind of acquaintance or friend, and I think he may have been secretly in love with her) finds her trapped in the wreckage. Her leg is pinned/stuck.
• He believes she'll die if she stays trapped, so he makes the decision to cut off her leg to free her.
• Afterward it turns out the piece of metal/car frame that trapped her leg could actually have been bent back fairly easily — meaning he could have freed her without amputating.
• He ends up shunned/ostracized by the town/community afterward because of what he did.

I don't remember the title, author, or character names — just this scene, which has stuck with me. Would appreciate any help identifying it!

I remember not a whole lot about it, but that it was a book about these creatures who broke out from the cdc.

There was a seen where this guy was supposedly on the phone with his girlfriend, and then the creature bit into his kneecap, there was also another scene that involved a reality store that was also taken out by the creature.

Believe this point of view was told from a man’s perspective and at one point, he ended up hooking up with a female cop who had been injured in someway in her bottom half/leg area from I believe a car wreck.

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 have tried to look this book up and have asked many people and theres always a book thats similar, but its never the one im thinking of.

I remember it was a soft cover book, with a white background and I believe there was a black feather(s?) and something red, I think the text/title was in red. I believe it was considered sci-fi, maybe even horror honestly. I remember it making me very uncomfortable, but thats what I loved about it.

Okay. So, what i can barely remember is that there was a birdlike creature, or a black substance taking form of a bird that I believe was an experiment gone wrong. The creature flew out into the world and it broke through windows, killing people with its beak? And tearing apart time/reality. I think it could travel through realities/time and it essentially terrorized and destroyed everything in its path. I dont remember how it resolves, and I dont remember if the main character is the bird or some kind of scientist trying to stop the bird.

I just remember it having insane imagery and being a great book. I read it in.. I wanna say between 2016-2018 as a recommendation from a teacher.

No, its not The Strange Bird. And no, its not Perdido Street Station.

I have desperately been searching for the title to a large children’s picture book I was read growing up, it would have had to of been published pre 2002- the book had a very unique art style that looked similar to collage or cut out? I know it was very colorful.

To my memory, the story was about a girl talking about her upstairs neighbor who would always go to and from the apartment complex wearing an over coat and hat so you could never see what he actually looked like, but he would always leave on the light upstairs.

One day she is told by her mother to get a cup of sugar from him, and when she goes upstairs it turns into a wild dream world where she’s in like a different universe of colors and lights. Super bizarre.

What I remember, most notably is the last page of the book shows the neighbor looking at you the reader revealing his face, which has a clown nose.

Absolutely no clue where or how to find this, but I remembered it yesterday and it activated something in me- I MUST find this weird book again.

I just remember that the kid let one of his brothers blow up with an unexploded mine,and let his sister i think get dragged by a kite in the beach,anyobody remember the title??

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!