The odd thing is, Locus lists it as appearing in two books, neither of which is familiar to me, and not in The Sci-Fi Factor. Guess I read it in Sixteen.
I actually tried that, but staff at international schools tends to change fairly often and it was 13 years ago, and it seems he’s dropped off the face of the planet since then.
Not Dahl either. This is good, though; if I keep on being able to cross authors OFF the list of potentials, I’m sure to run out of alternate options sooner or later, right?
All right, I have two mysteries for you detectives.
The first one was a story about a boy named Gerund who lived in a house with a cat who could talk. The cat was very sarcastic, and also existed in a parallel universe with another boy with a more normal name. The book either had really vivid imagery or illustrations, and there was a final encounter with a supernatural evil/bad guy that took place with one of the boys imprisoned in some sort of cage that was outside in the winter. The wild hunt may have been a theme in the book, and the characters may have sort of died, but not really, due to the parallel universe idea, though that was never explicitly stated.
The second is a series of books that were Chinese or Japanese fairy tales. There were three or four books in the series, and they all contained multiple stories. They were very small books–even as a child they were only a little bigger than my hand. One of the stories was about a bamboo cutter and his wife who wanted a child, and one night when the bamboo cutter was out cutting bamboo he opened a stalk and there was a tiny girl inside. The girl grew up with the man and his wife, but when she was old enough to get married she told her foster parents that she was actually a princess from the moon. The story ended with people coming from the moon to take her away. These books had black and white or very faintly colored illustrations and I remembered the ending illustration for the story I remember had the princess in a gorgeous gown being taken to the moon in a chariot.
Please help, I remember these books very fondly…if only I could remember their titles…
After playing around with Google for a while, I found this… The name is “The Wild Hunt”, could that be it?
Incidentally, I found the third mystery book I posted in this thread (it’s a series called Tim and the Midnight People), but the islands which spell something are still leaving me stumped.
Okay here’s mine - due to the content, a Google search is almost worthless…
YA book about a 16 year old that gets pregnant by her boyfriend, ends up moving out of her parent’s house into a roomate situation, where one of the girls already has a kid. Events ensue, she ends up out of the apartment and attempts to drown herself. She sees the light, doesn’t die, calls her mom, the end.
I remember it opened with a scene where the girl is trying to zip her jeans, and can’t because she’s getting a little bigger. It is all set in 1975-ish, and she doesn’t have the baby by the end of the book.
Anyone have any idea? I’d like to reread it to see if it was a good as I remember…
The unimaginatively titled Japanese Fairy Tale Series? The tale of the bamboo cutter is thought to be at least a thousand years old and has been retold in countless books and other media.
MandaJo, could your book be “Surviving the Applewhites?” Only one kid comes to their unschool, and they put on “The Sound of Music,” but it sounds similar.
I wish I could help with some of these, but my memory is absolutely awful. I have one of my own that’s been bugging me forever.
I probably read it about 13 years ago. It’s a youth fantasy/sci-fi novel about a girl who somehow knows the dates that people will die. I can’t remember if she has any other abilities in regard to predicting the future. She doesn’t want to know her own date of death. For some reason I also think it has something to do with windmills. I wish I could remember more, but if anyone can ID this I’ll be very grateful.
