The Vine: June 4, 2010
I read both of these stories while in middle school, so early ’80s. Both of them were stories included in our class-issued Language Arts books.
First was about a group of kids…I think it was a girl and her younger brother who ride with another young man into Mexico to pick up turquoise jewelry. I remember a detailed description of a bobby pin with a flower made of turquoise. Coming back into the U.S., they get stopped at the border and the guards find pot in the hubcaps. I never got to finish the story and want to know how that turned out!
Second story was about a very small girl, I envisioned her being about 6 years old but can’t swear that the story told her age, who lived with her parents and grandparents. During naptime she sneaks out and goes to a house on her street that is filled with a bunch of rugrats, and she has the time of her life. There were lots of details about her home…stuff like, quiet and cool, serene and so on. While the other house is chaotic, the kids have soda and hot dogs for lunch (specifically mentions soda in a bottle and ketchup)….kittens in a box behind the stove, and the house is old and there is a “tower” that they all go into and jump up and down and make the whole thing shake.
I think that her family finds her and takes her back home, but it was such a good story I want to know who wrote it.
I can’t remember to set my trash cans out on Tuesdays but by gosh I remember bits of stories I read 20 years ago!
Jody
*****
My memory is really fuzzy on details, but I am looking for a sci-fi/fantasy YA book that I read in middle school (1990-1995ish). I don’t know when it was written.
The cover was dark, with a creature (either the girl in the book or the animal) with big yellow eyes. The book was about (here’s where I’m grasping at straws) a place where these lemur-monkey-type things were intelligent beings, and I’m pretty sure they communicated telepathically. I think there was a human girl that landed there in a rocket or something, but I might be confusing a main lemur-monkey character with a girl in my head. I know there were several scenes devoted to the mother lemur-monkey protecting her children.
It’s not much to go on, but maybe someone else read this book, too.
Searching for books about lemurs has given me nothing
*****
Hi Sars!
I’m usually pretty good at finding things out via random Googling, but I have reached only dead ends with my current query. When I was very little (mid-1980s), I had a favorite board book that my parents would read to me. It was called something like “Allie Alligator’s Book of Colors.” Each color had its own description, and the very last page in the book went like this, “Black is the color of the night. Shhh…the baby animals are sleeping.”
I realize that this is a particularly tricky find, as board books are not a well-catalogued genre, but I thought that I would put it out there in case somebody (anybody!) remembers this book/knows where I could purchase a used copy/wants to sell me their copy.
Thanks in advance, readers!
Rachel
Tags: Ask The Readers popcult
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&tn=allie+alligator&x=0&y=0
Jody, the small girl who sneaks out (and plays with the poor kids, and they give her a kitten, and then her nanny finds her and drags her back and makes her leave the kitten; at the end, she takes a small bit of refuge with her grandfather, who thinks affectionately but dismissively of the worries of children) is from a story called “Nancy”, by Elizabeth Enright. The little girl’s name is actually Fiona Farmer, but on hearing this, one of the other kids says, “We’ll call you Nancy.”
I read it in a short story anthology which is long out of print, but it was originally published in a book of short stories by Enright, called The Moment Before the Rain. Here’s the google books result.
And here’s the first half of the first sentence, in case that’d help.
I’m pretty sure that the first one, about the kids going to Mexico to purchase jewelry, is by the awesome Lois Duncan. The book’s called They Never Came Home. I somehow missed this one years ago when it was first published (1990), and actually read it fairly recently when I was going through a phase of (re)reading everything by her that I could put my hands on.
I have a pretty long shot suggestion to offer for the YA science fiction story… I think that there is a planet with telepathic lemur-type aliens in Heinlein’s “Citizen of the Galaxy” (although it’s not the main setting for the book, and the main character is a boy).
You guys are so awesome!!
Oops…I almost forgot..what didn’t Lois Duncan write?? LOL thanks again!
To the person who was asking about the Sci Fi book – could it be Have Spacesuit – Will Travel, by Robert Heinlein? The main character in that book is actually a teenage boy, but he is “kidnapped” from earth along with a little girl called Peewee and a lemur-like character called “The Mother Thing.” Ultimately they all end up back on the Mother Thing’s planet where humanity is put on trial using samples from several ages of man (I think there is also a caveman and maybe an ancient Roman).
It’s one of my favorite of Heinlein’s books, so even if that isn’t the one you’re looking for, I highly recommend reading it. It’s awesome.
Unfortunately, that Allie the Alligator book is not the right one – much to my dismay!
Could the sci-fi book be “The Word For World is Forest” by Ursula K. LeGuin? The characters aren’t lemurs, but they are small and furry and live in the trees/forest. And they communicate via lucid dreaming. Not quite right, but maybe…?
I’m wondering if the alien book is A Place Of Silver Silence. The cover displayed here automatically isn’t the lemur-y one I remember as a kid, but if you look at the alternate cover images…
http://www.amazon.com/Place-Silver-Silence-Millennium/dp/0802768253
Oh, better writeup of the plot is here:
http://catalog.dclibrary.org/vufind/Record/ocm17767301/Reviews
The scifi book is definitely Have Spacesuit – Will Travel. The cover sounds like the edition of it I had growing up. The MotherThing is described as lemur-like, and her relationship and protection of PeeWee is a big part of the story.
Can’t find anything specific, but could the board book have been one of Richard Scarry’s? He had a character called Allie Gator, and his books were awesome.
Okay, that’s it, I have to read Have Spaceship, Will Travel. It’s been on the list ever since I read Connie Willis’s essay about how it was the first sci-fi book she read as a child, but this is clearly the icing on the cake. I’d better get on it before the ineffable forces of the universe get entirely fed up and throw the book at my head.
The second book, monkey-lemur things sounds vaguely reminiscent of this book I read as a YA. Alien Child.
http://www.amazon.com/Alien-Child-Pamela-Sargent/dp/0064470024
@ Jen S. – Do you happen to have a link or a citation for that essay? I have a huge soft spot in my heart for “Have Spacesuit,” because it was the first science fiction book I read when I was a kid. My dad gave it to me, along with 12 of his other favorite science fiction books, for my birthday. That was the year I discovered I could read, eat an apple, and walk, all at the same time (not so well on the walking or eating it turns out).
I do hope you will read it and then come back and post what you thought of it … oh my god – I just had a mini-fantasy of a Tomato Nation read-along!!! Totally out of the question? You’re probably right. Oh well, a girl can dream.
a Tomato Nation read along? Just the phrase made me perk up.
Ooh – a Tomato Nation read-along! I’d do it!
Hi, this is the sci-fi question asker. The plot and cover ringing the most bells is “A Place Of Silver Silence,” I’m pretty sure that was the one I’m thinking of. “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel” sounds awfully close, though, and I’m wondering if I read that one too and somehow conflated parts of them both. I’ll definitely read both if I can get my hands on them.
Thanks so much, that was really bugging me!
@birdie, I don’t know if it’s available online, but Willis writes about it in her introduction to her short story collection, The Winds Of Marble Arch. I know she has an official website, ConnieWillis.Net, where she may mention it as well. I have a huge reading crush on Connie Willis–not only is she a superlative writer, she comes across as a wonderful, warm, happy person, who never puts anyone or anything down because you never know, they might just be on the verge of spotting aliens, traveling to the past, or realizing the link between science and faith.
Plus, if it hadn’t been for reading To Say Nothing Of The Dog, I never would have sought out more of her stuff, realized that Heinlen is where she read Three Men And A Boat, read that, and met Jerome K. Jerome. I owe her a three hour cocktail drenched lunch!
Tomato Nation Read Along? Sign me up!
Er, that should read “…realized Heinlen is where she read OF Three Men and a Boat.” I don’t think Heinlen enbedded an entire comic novel from the late Edwardian era in his book.
a read along? oh yes, please!
my first thought on the “lemur” was LeGuin as well. I haven’t read that book in a long time though.
I’d do a TN read-along.
Will be checking the local library for the other stories listed – I’ve strayed from sci-fi for too long now.
I can hang with a read-along, under certain circumstances (which, I’m sorry to say, will not involve much sci-fi…you’re looking at baseball books and overviews of the Philadelphia Mob). I’ll try to start a thread this afternoon to discuss the parameters, but this would actually be a great way to force me to work my way through the unread stack, which is the size of a chunky eight-year-old at this point.
“overviews of the Philadelphia Mob”
yes please! :)