Definitely not Narnia; I read those books so many times as a kid I’d recognize them instantly. This had a much less “epic” feel. I even did a book report on it. Now, when I try to conjure the title up in my mind, I keep getting The Worst Witch, which is a completely different series.
I think the islands might have spelled “NO”?..
First thought that comes to mind is Quest for the Faradawn by Richard Ford. But I’m only suggesting it because the copy I had (and I don’t remember the details of it, because I read it so long ago) had a badger on the cover. But hey, worth a try. Maybe.
And have you tried What’s the Name of That Book over on Goodreads?
Thanks for the Goodreads link, I posted there as well. Incidentally, I came up with another one which I’ll also post there:
This was 6th grade, I think. We were assigned reading groups, and our group had a book about some sort of dystopic future where everyone over the age of 12 (?) had been somehow dispatched of, maybe by a virus. The kids ganged up and this particular group lived in an abandoned building, maybe either a school or a mall; there were scuffles between different gangs, and one scene had the children making Molotov cocktails. The main character was a girl.
Oh, man, I’ve unleashed a tidal wave inside my brain now. Expect lots more “what the hell”-type posts as I unravel the reading material I’ve gone through in elementary school.
Edit: HAHAHAHAHAA I REMEMBERED IT! This was “The Girl Who Owned A City”.
Oh, you beat me to answering your own question! That one I recognized right away. I’m stumped with the witch/island/badger one, if you’re sure it wasn’t the Narnia series. It sounds vaguely like Eva Ibbotson’s Island of the Aunts (also published under the title Monster Mission), but that came out in 1999/2000 so is probably too recent.
Here’s one that might test you.
A group of people( there might have been one woman) have been sent to Mars to help out with some mining project. Strange things start happening - freak machine accidents, communication interference, the usual. There’s lots and lots of talking, someone dies, and then a couple more die, and then they find a big cavern underground. In this cavern, they come across some alien artifact, that may or may not have been triangular.
And that is all I’ve got, because some smart swine had ripped the last 2 chapters out of the library book. There are some evil people about.
I’ve got a feeling this wasn’t by an obscure sci-fi writer either, but it wasn’t very thick. ( And 2 chapters less thick than it should have been. If it had been a paperback, I’m sure I’d have noticed - and I have learned since then always to check that a borrowed book is complete.)
None of these are ringing any bells, unfortunately, but I can’t resist throwing another one into the ring.
Illustrated children’s book, late 60s to very early 70s - I was probably no more than a toddler but I remember this one. A child, who is either very naughty or very downtrodden, is locked in an incredibly huge attic that houses a tremendous pile of junk and is told to clean it up. He unleashes magic, either by opening a book or finding some enchanted antique, and said magic helps him tidy the whole place up.
Anyone?
…another one… This was a reading series, with many books on different levels. Shadow people, witches (why? WHY WITH ALL THE WITCHES??!) and a (magical?) cat named Sebastian, who befriended a kid in the first book of the series. The illustrations were in color, but had a very grey theme, and the cats at least were very thin, kind of elongated.
We had these on a storage shelf in school, and I would read them while killing time before going home at the end of the day. However, the school didn’t have the complete series, so there were parts in the middle that got left out, and I never got to find out what happened in the end.
That is clanging a bell in my head, but I can’t place it.
auRa, yours is reminding me of an Eva Ibbotson book, though I can’t remember which one. I see that Lamia has already mentioned Ibbotson.
I’m next to useless in these threads even when I’ve read the books!
I just remembered another I’ve been meaning to ask about!
I read this in the early to mid 90’s and the book was well read so it had been around a couple years at least. It was a horror novel, and all I really remember is the cover had a girl and a cat on it and I think a pyramid.
The start of the book was set in Egypt, and a child and a cat were being made into a mummy, or bound (because they were cursed or for protection or something… akin to The Mummy). Then after the first chapter/prologue it went into modern times, and most of it revolved around a young child (maybe a girl) and a cat. I don’t remember much else except it was really creepy to me, and at the end the child was killed but the cat found another child and put its paw on their arm to ‘mark’ it (like a tattoo or birthmark shaped like a paw print). I think there was a scene with lots of cats also.
I think the title also had Cat in it, but I’m not sure. I’d like to know more about the ending because the last pages had fallen out and been taped in shuffled with some missing, so I got the gist of it but felt I missed out.
Help! I went to see The Duchess and realized that she was a supporting character in a book I read that was based on real British aristocrats around the French Revolution. Sheridan was there, and Fox, and the story was about an actress doing Sheridan’s plays, who was squired around by a British nobleman (married) who she wouldn’t sleep with until he left his wife (estranged, in another country). The nobleman’s sister or friend was a sculptress who would do portraits of other noblepeople. Anyway, The Duchess from the movie was one of their friends/relatives and they mention how Bess always travels with the Duke and Duchess she’s his live-in lover in the movie and this is alluded to in the bookHelp!
Looking at summaries of some of Ibbotson’s other books on Wikipedia, auRa’s witch/island book also sounds vaguely similar to The Secret of Platform 13. This book was published in 1994, so unlike Island of the Aunts it is old enough to possibly be the right book. The description isn’t that close to what auRa remembers though, so it’s kind of a long shot.
I’ve had no luck with anyone else’s requests, I don’t recognize any of the books myself and am not turning up any likely matches online.
Or maybe I have found one…this is fun, practicing my searching skills. 
I don’t recognize this one, but searching on Amazon I found Life Mask by Emma Donoghue, which seems to have all the elements you remember.
I’ve definitely read that one, though I can’t dredge from my brain anything about it.
I’m certain when I read it, I read it in an omnibus edition. Perhaps that’s what’s going on. A combination of multiple books. Is that possible auRa?
The story is “Future Tense” by Robert Lipsyte. You might be able to work backwards from that. Meanwhile, here’s a couple more book search sites.
Amazon has An Eva Ibbotson Collection containing Which Witch?, The Secret of Platform 13, Island of the Aunts. This collection was published in 2001 so is several years later than auRa remembers, but s/he may have read (or been read) several Ibbotson books individually. auRa mentioned thinking the title was something similar to The Worst Witch, and Which Witch? is pretty close. I have read Which Witch? and it’s nothing like the book auRa described – it’s about a wizard trying to choose a wife and, inspired by the Miss World pageant, staging a dark magic competition for single witches – but if auRa encountered several Ibbotson books at around the same time then s/he may be mixing them up.
Even if that’s not the case and auRa is remembering some totally different book, I’m happy to at least confirm that an Ibbotson collection does exist. I may have to find it myself sometime, I really enjoyed Which Witch? as a kid.
The Robert Lipsyte story “Future Tense” is available in the book Sixteen: Short Stories by Outstanding Writers for Young Adults. This is not specifically a science-fiction collection so it probably isn’t the book De La Rue was remembering, but if s/he wants to re-read that story again then it’s the first source I turned up. It’s possible that De La Rue read this book along with the anthologies I tracked down above – Sixteen seems like the sort of thing likely to be owned by a teacher or school library.
There was this paperback novel I read back in the early '80s. It was about some kind of deadly squid creature in a resort lake. It was pretty much a rip-off of Jaws, right down to the resort owner hiring some squid expert to come and try to kill the damn thing, but I’d love to re-read it just to see how bad (or maybe even good) it actually was. I don’t think I was even a teenager when I read it. Let’s see, the only other detail I can remember was the opening scene where the resort owner sits in a real estate office negotiating the deal for the lake and the cabins. Now, it may have even been called The Lake, but trying to find a book with that title on Amazon is a waste of time. There must be thousands of titles with the word ‘lake’ in them. So I guess I’m looking for the author’s name, if anyone can remember it.
Speaking of cheap, rip-off novels, there was another one I read around the same time that had a plot virtually identical to William Goldman’s Marathon Man, but this one was about a blind guy given drops that allowed him to see…I think. I’d love to see if I could find a copy of that one, too. I think the title was something like Blind Man’s Bluff or Second Sight or something along those lines.
Ok–Not a science fiction story. I read this book in the mid-80s, but it easily could have been 10-15 years old. I think it was set in Canada. A couple hundred pages long. It told the story of a highly experimental boarding school, where difficult, “neurotic” kids were sent: it was a sort of “unschool” school, where the kids could take classes or not. I remember they did a production of “Taming of the Screw” and went to a competition. It wasn’t dramatic or epic. And the title MAY have had the word “apple” in it. Any ideas?
Unfortunately, not Ibbotson. I Googled and none of the books ring a bell. I think the author was a man, and I’m pretty sure this was just one book (a paperback novel, I remember our class sitting in the reading area and watching our teacher read it and make the different voices) and not part of a series, since we moved on to Summer of the Swans afterwards and never read anything else like it. This is going to haunt me for the rest of my life. I shall never find peace. Aargh!
(Incidentally, putting down “witch + boy + badger + islands + children’s + novel” causes Google to ask me if I meant “bitchboy” instead… I think I would have remembered that book from fourth grade! :eek::D)
Do you think it could have been Roald Dahl’s The Witches? It doesn’t match all the details you remember, but it has witches and a boy who’s turned into a talking mouse (but not a badger), although I don’t remember anything about islands in it. But Dahl is very commonly read aloud to elementary school students, and your post reminded me of my beloved third grade teacher who read many Dahl books to us and did lots of different voices.