The Vine: Find That Book Fest II
Dear Sars,
I always thought that my first letter to you would contain at least a LITTLE drama or ethical dilemna, but here we have it.
I remember reading a wonderful book when I was around 10 years old (so, about 25 years ago) that was about a young girl who moved into a really big, really old house with her folks in the midwest(?). I want to say it was the fifties or sixties. The home is equipped with an old-fashioned intercom system. She spent a lot of her time riding her bike around with her friend — a young boy. At one point, they stumble across an old abandonned farm house where they find an old fan with an ivory handle. That is about all that I remember.
I had always thought that it was the Katie John series — I did read those, too, and have found copies of three of them through Alibris, but none of them match up to my memory of happenings.
If any of this rings a bell with you, I would greatly appreciate your help in locating which book it is. If not, sorry to have taken up your time and I hope that you don’t get fifty of these sorts of e-mails a day.
Needle in a bookshelf filled with hay covered in cobwebs
Dear Need,
I’m never any help with these. I swear, it’s like the only books I remember reading as a kid were The Secret Garden, The Girl With The Silver Eyes, and the one where the narrator’s friend gets stung by a bee and dies, and nobody ever asks about those.
But the readers, they know all. Let’s see what they’ve got this time.
(The boy who died in the bee-sting book was named Jamie, I think. Anyone?)
Tags: Ask The Readers popcult
Oh, dude, Nobody’s Fault. I remember the sister felt guilty because she was up in his room putting a rubber snake in his bed.
My teacher also read us Bridge to Terabithia in fourth grade. I wasn’t traumatized by the book, I was traumatized by my teacher BURSTING INTO TEARS and laying her head down on the desk to SOB. I can still hear her choking out “You were su-such a good f-friend to heeeeeeeerrrrrr…”
I loved all those messed up books, like ToB. I especially loved the ones about plucky 12-year-olds with leukemia.
What’s funny is that just a few minutes ago (before I checked TN for the day) I did a Google search for “book Sally WWII Jewish Florida” becausee I couldn’t remember the title of Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself. So yay, topical post, Sars!
Oh man… I’m not from the US, so we didn’t have those book catalogues, but we have awesome public libraries. I learned to read before preschool, and from age 7 onwards I went through the local library like wildfire. I read anything and everything that seemed interesting, so I read a bunch of classics and general fiction before I was old enough to really understand them. (First book I ever remember reading: Gone With the Wind, and I was seven…)
On the inappropriateness thing… my folks let me read pretty much anything from the public library (they were very concerned about inappropriate TV programs though), and unfortunately, I loved history so I found historical romance books.
My mom never reads romance, so she probably thought they were sort of fairy tales or general historical fiction. Consequently, I read some pretty trashy, bodice-ripper style romance with dated gender roles and weird “virgins and evil dominating lords” depictions of sexuality. Yes, we had that sort of stuff in the library. No, I don’t think that’s the greatest use of taxpayer money.
Pamie: I remember Christopher (by Richard M. Koff) too! This thread made me think of it; I wondered if anyone else remembered it.
It looks like it was reissued as “Christopher and his Magic Powers”:
http://www.amazon.com/Christopher-Magic-Powers-Richard-Koff/dp/0595179665/ref=sr_1_1/105-0569507-2712455?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191074380&sr=8-1
The Girl With The Silver Eyes! Sars, thanks for mentioning this book. I’d been trying to remember what it was called. I was musing to a friend, “It’s about this girl with silver eyes who had powers of telekinesis from her mom taking some pills when she was pregnant with the girl.” Little did I know I already had the title.
We had the book catalogues in Australia too. I outgrew them fairly early (like a lot of people at this site I moved on to my mother’s bookcase at a young age), but I loved the idea that you could order books and have them sent right too you.
With the adult books, once she realised I was gonna be reading them anyway my mother went from “you’re too young”, to “if there’s anything you don’t understand ask me and I’ll explain it.”
Oh man, Scholastic. Scholastic days were the best! I remember though, maybe like 1st or 2nd grade, they had the Wizard of Oz. (The real L Frank Baum book). I was so excited because I loved the movie. Then I got the book, and was so disappointed becuase it was almost nothing like the movie (not to mention really above my reading level at the time). It was the first time I realized books and movies are different.
I remember there was some other book I got from Scholastic in like maybe 3rd grade that the catalog even warned had mature language or something. For some reason my mom let me get it, and usually she was strict. It was about a bunch of boys at a summer camp-your typical everyone tortures the nerd but then they realize the nerd is really a good kid life lesson and everybody becomses best buds thing. (Which is totally what happens with kids in real life). Anyway, the “language” turned out to be I think one damn, maybe one SOB, and several fart jokes. But, in 3rd grade, I was the cool kid for about a week because I had a bad book where the characters farted and said bad words. Hee.
@Elizabeth – I was also a big fan of the ’12-year-old with leukemia’ books, and the one I remember best was called “Six Months to Live.” AWEsome. For the longest time, I thought every bruise I got (and I’m a klutz) was the first sign of leukemia.
Patricia Hermes apparently wrote a lot of books like that — What If They Knew and Friends Are Like That are other ones I liked. The other author like that — Six Months to Live, Somewhere Between Life and Death — is Lurlene McDaniel. I read lots of her books. I think my favorite was Someone Dies, Someone Lives, about the girl who gets a heart transplant.
BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA! Holy crap! Sars, I want you to know that your site and its wonderful readers just solved a mystery that’s been bugging me for … man, pretty much my entire life.
When I was in elementary school, twice a semester each class would get to skip the second half of the school day and watch movies. The movies were usually obscure straight-to-video pieces of crap they got from the local library because they were free. As a result, I don’t remember anything about any of them, except for one thing. See, I have this annoying habit of remembering little snippets of things from my childhood. Just little ten-second clips that are rarely important or in any kind of context. One of those things is from one of those movies that we watched in second grade, and it was a little boy standing in a wooded area, backing away from his parents and saying, “You’re lying. You lie. Leslie ain’t dead. She ain’t dead!” And then he runs away.
So. Ever since the second grade — seventeen years ago — I’ve been randomly recalling that little clip and wondering “Goddamnit, what the hell movie was that?!” But I’ve never asked anyone, because what I told you is literally the ONLY thing I remember from it and I figured it wasn’t enough to go on. Plus, based on the school’s other movie choices, I assumed it was incredibly obscure anyway. And then today, here I am reading through the comments, and I see people mentioning Bridge to Terabithia as a really depressing book. I don’t know what it is, so I Wikipedia it and read the summary, and … Leslie … has a young male friend … and she died … in the woods. Boom! I check the top of the article, and sure enough, it was made into a movie in 1987, two years before I was in second grade.
I know that was a long story, but I don’t care. I’m so stupidly excited that this won’t annoy me anymore. Thanks guys!!!
Oh, loving the Find That Book Fest.
My girls do get Scholastic book order forms, and we tend to order/overorder nearly each time. One cool thing about it is the teachers will hide the books and give them to you later if you mark that on the form, so it can be a surprise. One uncool thing that I don’t remember from when we were little is that every month they also have ‘clubs’ you can join, like book and toy of the month junk, that I never buy, and the way they display it, my 1st grader is always fooled into thinking this one’s not a club and begging for it.
They did/do have the Harry Potter books, and sets of the books, and the supplemental books.
Also, I don’t know how many Scholastic Warehouses there are, but we live right by one, and twice a year they have 50% off everything sales … at which I buy … mostly everything.
Scholastic!!!! I saved every penny of my allowance to get those damn books. One that still mystifies me as to the name to this day was a book about a girl who wrote her diary on a typewriter – it was in my third grade classroom, so that would be…1984? But who knows how long it was there before I discovered it. All I can remember is that I loved it and that she would type things like “drip drip drip (blood)” It wasn’t a creepy book at all, but that’s the one quote I can remember. I’d bake a damn cake for anyone who remembers that freaking book.
Oh, and speaking of third grade? They read OUT LOUD “Bridge to Terebithea” AND showed us the movie of “Where the Red Fern Grows”. Woo hoo, NJ catholic school system, I’ll be sending you my psych bills. Asses.
@Jo
I remember reading Gone With the Wind at about the same age. The copy at our school library was massive and packed with color plates from the movie so inevitably when I got it down from the shelf it thumped me on the head and I had to sit it on the floor and lean over it because I couldn’t hold it up for more than five minutes.
I also remember the Scholastic Book Lists and my mother rolling her eyes as I staggered to the car under the weight of about ten new books knowing she wasn’t going to get a word out of me for at least a week.
And my mother often tells the story of my first day of school when I burned through every book in the classroom inside an hour and asked what else they had. The way she tells it I ended up at the back of the room reading the phone book… nice pictures but very low on plot. lol.
Kate! Thank you so much!
Not enough exclamation points to express my happiness!
I think the first Scholastic book I ever got was Fabulous Animal Facts That Hardly Anyone Knows. I think it was either first grade or kindergarten — OK, Amazon says it was published in 1981, so that probably would have been first grade or maybe even second. Oh, man, did I love that book. Probably because I loved to recite facts to anyone who would listen. Apparently I was already a know-it-all at age 6.
I can’t remember what I got when I was older, though I vividly remember the sight of that flimsy newsprint “catalog” and the excitement I felt getting it. I’m so glad to hear they still do it!
I had forgotten all about the Katie John books until now. And I too loved The Girl with the Silver Eyes. Total awesomeness.
As for book orders, those and new school supplies account for about 90% of why I became an elementary teacher. When I hand out book orders to my kids, it never fails that my order from Scholastic totals more than all the kids’ orders put together. Incidentally, everything you order from Scholastic book orders earns the classroom bonus points meaning free books and supplies for the classroom. Also: the prices are the BOMB. Nowhere else are you going to get a brand spanking new book for 95 cents with no strings attached. I should earn a commission from Scholastic, I’m so vocal about how great they are.
CHRISTOPHER PIKE! I read everything I could get my hands on by Christopher Pike, and Remember Me was my favorite book until I was at least sixteen (which I guess means that, for a while, it beat out Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and other Real Books, but I digress).
Aw! Scholastic book orders! Those are a bittersweet memory, since we rarely got to order from those when they got handed out. We were a weekly library excursion family, mostly because we were generally pretty broke. I remember once my mom let my siblings and I pick one book each as a special treat, and she was rather disappointed at my choice of “How To Eat Fried Worms” — not because of the subject matter, but because it didn’t count as a Real Book to her.
Oh, jeez, someone else remembers “You Give Me A Pain, Elaine”? I thought I had made up my memories of that book. God, I love Find That Book Fest.
I just have to add to the Scholastic book love. I have some of the funniest little books on my shelf because of those orders (like, I’m pretty sure “Hating Alison Ashley” came from the flimsy little catalogue) and I kind of wish there could be a grown-up version! I graduated to my parents’ bookshelf very late because I love YA so much…come to think of it, maybe I don’t need a grown-up version…
WOW!
What an incredible response! Thank you for helping me get to the bottom of the Katie John mystery! I ordered “Honestly, Katie John” today!
I, also, spent much of my time reading inappropriate books for my age. (considering that I am re-reading a lot of my childhood fav’s, I probably still do!) Starting with “My Sweet Audrina” at the age of ten, my mother bought the whole flowers series for me, there is absolutely NO WAY that she knew the nature of those books, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell her. I also spent some time with holocaust books “Diary of Anne Frank” and “Escape from Warsaw”. When she caught me reading “Go Ask Alice”, she asked me to consider whether or not it was appropriate for me, and while she didn’t tell me not to finish it, she did make it clear that if I thought that I was mature enough to read it, I may actually be mature enough to put it down for a few years. I only had about ten pages left. REALLY, the damage was done. What person in their right mind can STOP reading a book that close to the end? I felt guilty about it though. Smart lady, that mom of mine.
AMANDA! AND PAMIE!! And Elizabeth! I was just writing a post about Nobody’s Fault when I got to your comments!!!! I remember the entire book in vivid detail. Because I have a big brother I have always idolized and I find a book where the big brother DIES to be incredibly TRAUMATIC. I think I got the book as a present or hand me down, too. UGH.
Brother and sister fight a lot, they have a fight and she’s really mad at him. That particular day she was supposed to get her turn on the mower first (her chore was to mow the front yard, his the back) and he swiped the mower while she was checking the yard for sticks and rocks (Their dad’s rule: unsafe to run over with the mower). He wanted to get done so he could go play baseball with his friends and she was pissed he took the mower when it was her turn. Also, he didn’t check the backyard first like they were supposed to, otherwise he would’ve seen the wasps nest.
While he’s out mowing the lawn on the riding mower, she’s busy inside hiding a DEAD snake in his bed (not rubber. he’s incredibly terrified of snakes. She was planning the prank for days because she found the dead snake a day or two before he died. She used tissues to pick it up and dropped it in a brown paper bag). While she’s playing this mean prank on him, he runs over a wasps nest, gets stung like crazy, falls off the riding mower which then RUNS HIM OVER.
The mower ran him over then butted up against a rock wall at the back of the yard (the same rock wall she found the dead snake behind). She finally came outside because she heard the weird whine of the mower running but sitting still. Yes she finds the body and yes they describe all the blood. (I could probably quote this scene if you want, I just can’t remember if the book is written in first person. I think it is.)
She spends the rest of the book in therapy, she’s really conflicted both because she blames herself for his death, feels guilty she was doing something mean when he died, and she obsesses about the few times he was nice to her in his last days. -Like when she pesters him endlessly to help her practice baseball, and she misses the catch and gets a black eye, and he gives her his favorite baseball hat to hide her face. She wears the hat obsessively after he dies. Also he had one of those “Secret boxes†That looks like a solid cube, but if you grab the sides and pull it opens – he showed her how to open it, then he gave it to her and she keeps his hat in it.
Oh and his name was Matt but she called him “Monseâ€, short for “Monsterâ€. Can’t remember her name.
It’s the most depressing book I ever read, I cried the entire book, and I couldn’t sleep for a week. My brother is not afraid of snakes, we never fought that much, and we never had a riding mower. But still.
“here, read this book! about a young girl Just Like You! She has a brother Just Like You! AND THEN HE DIES even though he is just a kid, AAAH HA HA HA HAHAAA!” Haaaaaaaaaate. *hugs my brother*… *sniffle*
ditto to like a billion other things in everyone’s comments (except reading VC Andrews) but this post is already 6 pages long.
“What’s funny is that just a few minutes ago (before I checked TN for the day) I did a Google search for “book Sally WWII Jewish Florida” becausee I couldn’t remember the title of Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself.”
I loved that book. And I got it from a Scholastic order (as well as Number the Stars, another good Holocaust book for kids) I managed to read all those books in about an hour, but my parents got a lot of them for me. The other Judy Blume books I found through Scholastic that no one seems to have heard of were Blubber and Iggie’s House.
I’ve never been into the “kid with leukemia” books, but I used to work in a bookstore and laughed at the shelf full of them – I think the author who writes the most is Lurlene McDaniels. Or Lorelai. Something like that. The book I did enjoy with that plot was a Lowis Lowry. I think it’s called “A Summer to Die.”
A Taste of Blackberries!