Is there a magical website that helps you find books from your childhood?

[NigelWithTheBrie79]

I've tried googling details I remember for different books but no luck as of yet.

You’re welcome @Wizzwazzwas. I reread it quite recently. It’s very good.

@sueelleker Thank you so much for "The Saturdays". Have been looking for years. All I could remember was the perfume used to remove the nail polish was called "Night on the Nile", but googling that never gave me any results!

Also @SamhainToImbolc Thank you for Charlotte Sometimes. i loved that one

Have downloaded both onto kindle and looking forward to them both

@Wizzwazzwas

I have one too... does anyone remember a children’s book that involved some sort of magic transformation of the main character on a double decker bus eating cold chips? Possibly into a bear...

I realise this sounds like I might have taken something hallucinogenic

Ursula Bear

She eats a honey sandwich saying "I'm a bear" and turns into a bear. To turn back again she eats I think burger and chips saying "Raebami" (I'm a bear backwards)

[quote pollyhemlock]@MargaretThursday is your kidnapping one either No Way of Telling by Emma Smith ( 1972) or The Kidnapping of Suzie Q by Catherine Sefton (1994) ?[/quote]
Might be the first, but definitely not the second as I read it before 1994. I don't think it's the first as I don't remember the snow, but I've ordered it from ebay to go in my "just in case we have to isolate" box to see!

OMG you are a genius!! I have wondered about this for years. Now ordered a preowned copy of Ursula Bear from ebay

I had Ursula Bear too, I loved it but had completely forgotten about it except when I meet or come across an Ursula

@pollyhemlock
Is your name anything to do with Fire and Hemlock by Dianna Wynne Jones? (Whose books should be as well read as Harry Potter...)

@Pralinelatte

I have one.

Read in the 90's, a novel that included a boy or girl, or maybe both, skating north on the frozen river Ouse past Ely up to the coast. I think late Victorian/Edwardian times. Wonderful description of Ely cathedral appearing floating above the fen mists. Cannot remember anything else but would love to read it again!

In Toms midnight garden a boy and girl skate up the Ouse to Ely

Can anyone help me with this one? I must have read it in the 80s. All I can remember is the start of the book about a lady who had been an actress but had hurt her leg so couldn't do it any more. But she could still act 'so she acted being perfectly happy.' One day at the bottom of her garden a clumsy fairy accidentally bumps into her toe and becomes visible and...I can't remember anything else but I'd love to read it again if anyone recognises it...

@bobblesandbows

Can anyone help me with this one? I must have read it in the 80s. All I can remember is the start of the book about a lady who had been an actress but had hurt her leg so couldn't do it any more. But she could still act 'so she acted being perfectly happy.' One day at the bottom of her garden a clumsy fairy accidentally bumps into her toe and becomes visible and...I can't remember anything else but I'd love to read it again if anyone recognises it...

The Fairy Rebel by Lynne Reid Banks?

[quote postitnot]@pollyhemlock
Is your name anything to do with Fire and Hemlock by Dianna Wynne Jones? (Whose books should be as well read as Harry Potter...)[/quote]
Yes indeed!

This will be incredible if anyone can identify it.....

Large format picture book from the 1980s. Featured a magic carpet that flew over worlds made of food, e.g. one double page spread would be lots of different types of cakes, another would be different types of fast food. The drawings were very realistic (not cartoony). It's possible (though I may have imagined this) that there was a slot on each page where you pushed a physical magic carpet through (made of card obvs!). I also for some reason think it might have been a St Michaels (M&S) book.

@MissyB1 as well as the Brownies series by Verily Anderson that a pp mentioned, there’s also a series of Brownie books by Pamela Sykes, so yours could be one of those.

I’m also looking for a book featuring Brownies, but mine’s not by either of those authors! In mine a girl called Laura moves and joins a Brownie pack. There are three Sixes and each Six has something special about their place in the hall where they have their meetings. One is by the furnace so it’s nice and warm, one is by the art cupboard so they have easy access to craft stuff. I think it may have been set in Tewkesbury (or Laura had just moved there from Tewkesbury). I would have read this in the late 80s or early 90s.

I have one that's a recent book if anyone could help. I've been through fifty odd pages of books I've bought from Amazon and can't find it so must have been from a charity shop.at

It's a thriller/ domestic type book I think. I can't remember much apart from one daughter, a teenager at secondary school was i THINK being bullied. Got invited to a Halloween or fancy dress party by some kids from the school and it was being held at the school, and they all got ready together at the girls house, mum was pleased. Then I think they walk through a park, pressure the girl into getting drunk and leave her. Ends with someone jumping or falling off the school roof.

Not reconstructing Amelia. It's been driving me crazy!

Ooh, I have a couple if anyone could help!

The first I read when about 12 or 13 so mid-90s. Was also about the bubonic plague, but I think was set in the present day so don't think it was one previously mentioned. I'm pretty sure it involved a girl digging up a body contaminated with the plague and causing a pandemic. They might have also been learning about it at school... It terrified me at the time..

The other was a book we were either read in class or I read at school in year 5, so early 90s. Involved a boy and I think his dad who were on a small aircraft. It crashed, I think the pilot died, not sure what happened to the dad (if he was on board). Crashed in a forest (maybe set in America?). The boy had to survive by eating what was around, he tried some berries, but they made him sick.

Thank you in advance!

Also enjoying this thread!

On a slight tangent, but did anyone else get absolutely terrified by some of the books they read as a child?! I used to love horror l, but I'm not sure why as they used to give me nightmares.

This is one book title I remember, but did anyone else read Room 13 by Robert Swindells? About a group of four school children who go away on a school trip and stay in a hostel type place. There's one girl who seems to get posessed by something, starts sleepwalking at night etc. There's a room with no number in the day, but in the night it becomes room 13. The others each subconsciously buy something that can defeat a vampire (eg one of them buys a stick of rock which they suck a bit of each day.. It becomes pointed). Terrified me for weeks!!

@Silversun83 Yes, I used to absolutely terrify myself. I remember reading until really late at night because somehow finishing the book was better than leaving it hanging. I read a lot of Stephen King as a teenager. But even as a child there were parts of books that used to terrify me - Green Noah in the Children of Green Knowe was one. The troll in the ladybird Three Billy Goats Gruff. A Famous Five book where Anne sees “a face at the window”. The Armada Ghost Stories books. And yet I kept re-reading them!

I remember spooking myself when I went through a Christopher Pike phase.

@Silversun83 The plague one could be The Pit by Ann Pilling, though the central character is a boy rather than a girl.www.goodreads.com/book/show/3616338

I have been trying to find a childhood book for about 20 years.

All I remember is a king, jester and other characters and they ended up going to a land with lollipop trees and had to get back home. I remember it had a yellow cover but that's all I remember. It's not the far-away tree. I would really love to know the name of this book. It has driven me mad for years!

A long shot. It was called Boss Lady and I read it with my small daughter in the mid-70s. Probably American ( though we got it in England ), illustrated in mostly black and white cartoonish drawings. About the boss of an office, who was female and, um, bossy.
A clunky early feminist tract , which has had an oddly potent effect on my daughter.
I would pay good money for a copy.

@changeyourname11111

I’ve got one as well.

Very vague details. Something about being lead somewhere by night - by moonlight? - and a thread had to be followed.

There might have been a ruby or a precious stone involved.

I bet that's the Princess and the Goblins, by George MacDonald. Magical.

"The other was a book we were either read in class or I read at school in year 5, so early 90s. Involved a boy and I think his dad who were on a small aircraft. It crashed, I think the pilot died, not sure what happened to the dad (if he was on board). Crashed in a forest (maybe set in America?). The boy had to survive by eating what was around, he tried some berries, but they made him sick."

I read this! I can remember the first chapter where the pilot had a heart attack (I think), but not the rest.

I've got one if anyone can help. It's about a girl called Charlie who's sent to live with her aunt, but she misunderstands a letter and thinks the aunt doesn't want her so starts sleeping rough. I would have read it in mid-late 80s

@Dyerun I think that’s Charley by Joan G Robinson