It’s the Fall Classic Ask The Readers edition of The Vine — reader Daisy has offered to donate $25 to the uniform haul if one of you fine people can identify the book she’s looking for! Thanks, Daisy. We’ve got another YA mystery for you to solve, too, if you can.

Stay tuned today for a fund-raising update — and more candy.

Okay, I’ve been looking for this book for-frickin-ever. I have posted it to the LiveJournal community “whatwasthatbook,” and also emailed it to a national listserv of YA librarians, but no luck. I think it’s time for the Nation to take a stab at it.

The book is set in the Great Depression. The MC was a girl somewhere between the ages of 9 and 14. Her name was something like Molly or Polly McCracken (but Googling those is fruitless). She was known for being a chatterbox; her family kept telling her to be quiet, stop talking so much, etc.

But then, when her little brother has appendicitis and they have no way of getting him to a hospital, she is able to talk the railroad (?) into stopping a train on a bridge near their house so they can put the brother on and take him to a city. So, you know, she’s vindicated because talking got her somewhere. At least I remember that being the moral of the story.

Other things I remember:
Near the beginning, the MC is talking to her dad when he’s trying to listen to the radio. He’s listening for prices of corn, pigs, things like that. He hears some really bad price — I want to say three cents for hogs — and he gets really mad at the MC for talking during this broadcast.
She had a teacher she liked a lot, but the teacher got fired for being married.

I read it when I was about ten years old, so about 1986. It was a Christmas gift from my aunt, who lived in Warren, Pennsylvania. Apparently the author was local and had autographed my copy. Unfortunately, my aunt has no memory of this — I tried. I think — but am not sure — it was a new book at that time.

I really liked it and would love to read it again, so if anyone has ANY tips about anything it even MIGHT be, or the author, I would be delighted.

Daisy, also a librarian, but apparently not that talented

*****

Hi Sars,

I’m trying to track down a YA fantasy novel I read as a kid in the early ’90s. It was about a brother and a sister who go to a friend’s place and it turns out that their babysitter is a princess from a magical realm and takes the kids over there with her on adventures. (…Yeah.)

That’s all I really remember except for a bit at the end where there’s this amazing imagery of a tower by a lake with this seemingly endless staircase. Also, it turns out the neighbourhood bully is the evil wizard bad guy in the other world. I remember the cover was very autumnal in colouring and maybe had dried leaves swirling around a picture of the babysitter/princess, who definitely had wild brown curly hair streaming out behind her (her hair may have been integral to my developing a mild obsession with long, curly brown locks, now that I think about it).

I’ve tried Google searches, looking on Amazon, everything, but keep coming up short. Perhaps one of the TN readers knows?

Wondering Why My Babysitters Were Never So Awesome

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