gigi, I feel like yours is a Lois Lenski book…I’m leaning towards Prairie School but I can’t prove it.
A book I read in elementary school in the late '70s was about a kid nicknamed “Mouse”, who like to do funny graffiti, IIRC. In a city park he tries to climb up some boulders/rocks because there is a small, naturally occuring slot in the side of the rock and he wants to paint “Insert Coin Here”. I think he had to deal with a bully as well.
Also, whenever anyone my age is trying to think of a childhood book, I always offer 'Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack" or “Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret”.
Nope, it was a stand-alone book, on its own. One of those very short kid’s books.
By jove, I think it was book 2 The City of Gold and Lead. The cover looks familiar (edition with the boy in the foreground). Thank you, I’ll have to read the series now.
Not expecting any identification here – in part, because “different country from that of the majority of SDMB action”. Just posting because of a pleasant and comical memory being called up.
The book in question was borrowed from the children’s section of our local library, in the UK nearly 60 years ago. It must have been by a Briton who was familiar with India – natural-history-based fiction, essentially realistic à la Tarka the Otter, but for kids: contained four stories about families of respective different kinds of Indian wild animal in their native habitat. I liked the stories perfectly well, but recall no details about them – would guess them to have been competently written, but not works of genius. The four species involved were: tiger, elephant, bear, and deer.
The thing I still remember with delight, is incidental to the book itself. Some previous borrower had clearly been less than super-impressed with it / its subject matter. Written in pencil in a childish hand on the first page of three of the stories, were brief comments, with a couple of mis-spellings, as follows. “I don’t like tigers.” “Elephants are clumsey.” “Bears are firice – I don’t like them.” (There was nothing written about the deer – the juvenile critic would seem to have considered them acceptable.) While writing in library books is, of course, a deplorable thing to do; the unknown kid’s pithy comments totally cracked my parents up with laughter.
I remember reading an environmentalist picture book about a planet full of vaguely camel/llamalike creatures before it is suddenly colonized by a race of blue-skinned aliens who immediately begin developing the planet into an industrial society while using up its resources and causing huge amounts of pollution. Said aliens end up leaving the planet for greener pastures after having exhausted its resources and the camel/llamalike creatures look hopefully at the planet becoming green again.
I asked about this one before, but with no luck.
Let me give this a try cause I would love to find it.
It was a book of horror short stories probably for kids and teens somewhere @ 1970. It had a story where a person buys a can that has lost the label in a grocery store, for a discount. A mystery food as it were. It is some kind of tomatoey thing but becomes terrifying. That’s all I recall.
Wow, so many people who struggle with remembering the name of books! Yay, glad it’s not just me.
I’m of no help on any of these, the only one that rings a bell I think was answered- the Tripod series (which is still one of my favorites).
This sounds like Lucky Star, by Cathy Cassidy.
There was a book about a shoemaker/cobbler in seaport town who had a hard time getting any business until the captain of a cruise ship offered to let him open a shop on his ship. It was wonderfully illustrated but I can’t remember the name of it.
I looked up that book, and it wasn’t it, but thank you for the suggestion.
I did a few searches and for the first time, I think I found the book; “The 18th Emergency” by Betsy Byars. I’m going to try to get a copy and if it’s the correct book, I’m going to give it to my son.
Here’s another one. It was the first book I took out of the “Library” in first grade.
It was a kids picture book set in Panama and had to do with a golden frog.
This was “The Wump World” by Bill Peet.
I would have sworn the one I was thinking of was by Lois Duncan, but I can’t come up with it. I read it in elementary school or possibly early in junior high, so it had to have been published published pre-1980.
It was older kid/young YA, about a girl with ESP. I don’t remember much about what she did with said ESP, but I remember a side plot was putting on a play about a haunted sorority or some such (“The Ghost of Delta Delta,” “Phantom of Delta Delta,” something like that). I think it was made into a TV movie or after-school special.
I can even remember the cover. It was a girl with an ear-length bobbed perm, with a fuzzy light hovering over her.
But the name escapes me entirely.
Here’s one I would know if I heard the title. It takes place in the British colonies in North America, when the French are still in Canada and maybe New York.
There is a young white girl whose settlement is attacked by Indians. I think some of her family is killed, but she is taken away to live with the Indians, and has two sisters who foster her. She is blonde, which really makes her stand out. I don’t remember her name or the name of anyone else, or what tribe it was, but I’m pretty sure it was in what is now New York state. Eventually she comes to regard her captors as family, and when she has a chance to leave she declines.
It’s bugging the hell out of me not to remember the title because I know I read the book more than once. But I haven’t thought about it in years, and had forgotten it until this thread came up.
Oh, I have bunches I can’t remember the titles of. Some have stumped the goodreads folks.
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In a book set way back when (no later than the 30s) a girl, probably between ages 9 and 12, loses a baby sibling either at birth or soon after. Mom has severe post partum depression, and an aunt probably looks after the kids. People sit on the roof which is somehow significant to the plot.
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In another book set way back when (even longer ago, the teens or 20s maybe?) a ten or so year old boy’s mother takes in a small girl who washed ashore after a shipwreck. I don’t think the girl spoke. The titanic was likely referenced in some way, but maybe as another recent wreck.
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A girl goes to visit her grandparents, and grandpa is going senile. The island the grandparents live on is described as “shaped like a mitten.”
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Two human children, a boy and a girl, are raised on another planet by furry humanoids (maybe the aliens have no visible eyes?). They were kept apart and only meet as preteens because the aliens were alarmed that the boy hit the girl the one time they were together as toddlers.
That’s The Summer Birds by Penelope Farmer. Lovely book. I love her Charlotte Sometimes even more.
I remembered that it was a Lois Lenski book, and a little Google-fu revealed that it’s titled “Cotton In My Sack”. The family was from the Deep South. On top of throwing the book into a pond, she also stopped going to school because she was afraid she would get in trouble for damaging the book.
I read and loved that book too! 
Here’s mine. In this case, it was from my high school library, even though it was probably more suitable for upper elementary. Still, it was a good story. The first line in the book was “Who the hell is Sonja Henie?” Long story made short: A pond is drained for unrelated reasons, and reveals a car and trailer from the 1940s, with several skeletons inside, and a little girl is holding a Sonja Henie doll. The rest of the book is devoted to solving the mystery - identifying the family and then finding out who did this and why. The book probably came out in the early to mid 1970s.
Sonja Henie was an ice skater and actress in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.
Oh you’re right! I’m delighted that my “question” was answered. Thank you!