Dear Sars,

Yet another “help me find a book to share with my kids” request is in the offing. I can’t help myself. I have Googled the living tar out of it, but I have not been able to find my adored Easter bunny book from childhood.

It features many types of Easter bunnies, such as the World Traveling Easter Bunny, and tells about their habitats and proclivities. Lots of beautiful pictures. It’s just the thing for training up junior ethnologists.

Anyone have a title or an author? It would make me really happy to find it.

Man, There Are A Bunch of Bunny Books Out There

*****

Sarah,

I have turned up nothing on my many internet searches to help me on this book hunt, so I’m hoping Vine readers can offer some assistance. I am looking for a children’s book from the late 1960s or early 1970s that involves sisters out on a walk with their dad (or were they alone? I don’t recall…sorry). They come across a carousel. While riding, their horses leave the carousel. That’s all I clearly remember from the book’s plot. I know it’s not much, but hopefully someone remembers it from their childhood.

Thanks so much!

Kristen

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I am throwing my hat into the “please help me find this book” ring.

I checked this book out of my middle-school library a bazillion times. Unfortunately, that library is now located far, far away from me, and I don’t know that they would be keen on letting a grown woman ransack the library looking for it anyway. And this was 20 years ago so it’s probably not there anymore.

The story takes place in England, and the chief narrative is the female protagonist’s relationship with a guy at her school, who possibly is named Mark and who has a motorcycle. He is working-class, she is not, her parents object, etc. In the house next door, there is a Jewish family with two kids. The daughter, who may be named Rebecca, is about the girl’s age and — this is what I remember most vividly — has a column in her bedroom that Rebecca covered with some sort of beautiful mosaic. The son is older than the girl, may be named Leo, and is very handsome. I think he kisses the girl at some point. The working-class boyfriend gets into a motorcycle accident at some point. That’s all I remember. I read this book over and over circa 1983-1986.

Thanks so much for any help from the TN readers…

I Can Almost Smell The Middle-School-Library Dust

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Hi Sars!

I have a request for the readers to help me find a book I read and can’t locate now. It was not very old, probably published in the last five years. I think it was a male author. The narrator was definitely male, and it was a first-person narrative.

This Guy is a vampire. In fact, he was instrumental in spreading the vampire virus to the extent that vampires became the dominant species. Humans are now all kept on farms where they are bred and their blood harvested.

One night, TG is out for a drive, and stops for some reason. He finds the body of a human woman in the woods who’s been slaughtered, and then back at his car finds a Young Girl of about 7 (I think), who is the dead woman’s daughter. YG stabs TG, who of course doesn’t die, and TG decides to smuggle YG back to his apartment and ends up raising her.

Some other details are that TG had to order all her food online, and it was all ridiculously expensive because food became a nostalgia/vintage item. Also TG had turned the toilet into a planter, and YG could only flush the toilet during the day so no one could hear her.

I can remember pretty much the entire plot, and I’ll tell the readers the ending if it’s necessary to identify the book. This book wasn’t a part of a series, as far as I know, it read like a standalone novel. Also, the relationship between TG and YG wasn’t sexual, in fact TG acquires a vampire girlfriend over the course of the story.

I’ve tried Googling relevant keywords, but the popularity of the genre plus the popularity of porn means I haven’t gotten anywhere. I have faith in the Tomato Nation though.

Kate

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Hey Sars,

The children’s book I’m trying to remember involved a young girl’s magical adventures under the sea. She is somehow given the ability to breathe underwater (or not to need to) and befriends some sea creatures, and a quest and derring-do ensue.

The vibe was very much like “The Phantom Tollbooth,” full of plays on words. I suspect it was a little older, maybe from the 1940s or 1950s, but that’s entirely a guess. It had black-and-white line-drawing illustrations.

The few details I remember:

On reaching the underwater world, the girl sees a color completely unlike any color she’s seen before, and she decides to call it “twirl.” (I remember this because I spent quite a while trying to imagine what a completely new color would look like.)

She meets, and I think befriends, a pirate named Captain Teach.

She also meets a trio of monkeys, the Evil brothers, whose names are Seeno, Hearno, and Speakno. (Get it?)

A critical task at the end of her quest involves getting a certain bird to alight in a “dimity tree.” It turns out that the phrase “The [something] bird has landed in the dimity tree” is an expression her family uses to mean that a conversation has lapsed into silence. She and her friends try to figure out how to get that to happen, and as they run out of ideas, the conversation lapses, and sure enough the bird alights in the tree and all is well.

I found this book on the shelf at the children’s library when I was maybe 10. I’ve never heard anything remotely like it since and many attempts to locate it with Google have failed. This kind of book seems to be right up the alley of your readers, and I’d love it if anyone can tell me what it was.

Readno Evil

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Hi Sars!

You and your readers are just so good at finding books, I have to ask your help on one that’s been bugging me for years. I read this around 2000 or 2001, as part of a high school class, which makes me think it might have won some awards/been famous/otherwise had some reason for the teacher to assign it, but I’ve never been able to Google it up. I don’t think it was a classic: it seemed like it had been written fairly recently.

The book is a novel, set in Appalachia in the 1700s or 1800s. The main plot concerned a Big-City (maybe even British?) man who came to the area for some humanitarian reason; I think he was a doctor or a teacher? I remember he fell in love with one of the local women, and when he caught some kind of fever, she took care of him. There was even a scene where she gave him a sponge-bath, which quite scandalized me and my classmates. I seem to remember that there were multiple narrators, and one of the words in the title might have been “Hollow” or “Holler.”

Possibly there was a magical-realism-type scene at the end, where a character who was accused of being a witch casts a real spell, but I might be getting that detail from a different story.

It’s not Songcatcher or Gap Creek, by the way. But if anyone else can remember this book, I will love you forever. This has been driving me crazy for years.

I didn’t even like it that much at the time, and now I can’t get it out of my head

*****

Dear Sars,

My search for an old children’s book has been constantly hampered by the fact that I remember very little of it other than the eventual solution to the mystery — and even that is dubious.

I would estimate that the book was published pre-1950; it was almost certainly set before then. I also think it was set/published in America, though I came across it in Britain.

As I recall, some sort of incident causes young siblings to relocate from the city to a smaller town where they end up solving a mystery connected to a female friend or relative (possibly an aunt) and the disappearance of her fiancé. The eventual solution to the mystery involves his identical twin, who I think was in love with the female in question, killing his brother before posing as him and undertaking some massive scheme, including signing a check at the bank very shakily (for some reason I remember that part quite vividly). I think the body of one or other of the twins is discovered to be buried in the garden or barn or somewhere after this is revealed.

The only other thing I can remember about the plot is that pies or cakes sold in little tins were a popular snack, and at some point the children had some sort of tea party using the empty tins.

I want to say that the twins could be in some way distinguished by different-coloured eyes, but I might be mixing it up with the strange events of Anne’s House of Dreams by L.M. Montgomery.

Unsurprisingly, various combinations of the words “check,” “identical twin” and “pie” have turned up very little. Can the readers possibly help?

Jenny

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