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Children's books

Join in for children's book recommendations.

books from the 1980s that no-one else remembers!

341 replies

GoldenGreen · 21/12/2010 11:22

For some reason I have been compulsively trying to track down half-remembered books that I read as a young teenager - not sure why as they are not classics but I would really like to revisit them. I had hoped my younger sister might have picked them up but she never liked the same books as me.

Does this ring a bell with anyone:

Series with the children of detectives - I think a brother and a sister and an adopted sister (her parents were police officers who died - I think she was Irish, red haired and fiery - obviously) - they solved mysteries based around school. In one they caught a vandal because of the paricular way he wrote "H". In another there was a school trip to France with an old fashioned type of Polaroid camera - this was a key part of the plot but can't remember any more!

The other book that I remember reading obsessively was a teen romance one with a girl whose parents were repressed and abusive. She was not allowed any freedom at all but managed to meet a boy and sneak out. The thing I most remember is that she had no clothes apart from school uniform so she had to embroider flowers on her school shirt when she went out to meet him.

Anyone else got any vague memories of books they once loved and that no-one else ever remembers?

OP posts:
nickeldonkeybethlehemsinsight · 23/12/2010 09:53

according to Random House, A Backward Shadow is also available.
ISBN 9780099529071

nickeldonkeybethlehemsinsight · 23/12/2010 09:54

ah! here

nickeldonkeybethlehemsinsight · 23/12/2010 09:54

EArthsea all still available
Lots of Judy Blume.

I've also got a collection of Paula Danziger here...
Xmas Grin

nickeldonkeybethlehemsinsight · 23/12/2010 09:56

oh, look at that, Z for Zacharaiah is also still available.

I can get all of these! Xmas Grin

gaffataperules's DH did you hear that? z for Zachariah's still available! Xmas Wink

parched · 23/12/2010 10:11

OMG - thought I was the only one who remembered Sue Barton - Student Nurse/District Nurse etc!

scrivette · 23/12/2010 10:18

My absolute favourite, which I still read, is A Little Princess by Francis Hodgson Burnett.

I also loved Red Sky at Night and cried every time I read it!

I reread The Cukoo Sister a lot, about a girl whose baby sister was stolen at birth and when the girl was about 14 the long lost sister returned.

nickeldonkeybethlehemsinsight · 23/12/2010 10:23

I loved a book called Thursday's Child.

I can't remember now who it's by, but it was a couple of kids in the black country, victorian days, and they lived on a canal boat.
I was totally taken in by the imagery of the canals - the boat pulled by horses, except in a tunnel where the men would "leg it" through.

brillopads · 23/12/2010 11:14

OMG what an awesome thread!
I was (still am) such a bookworm as a kid.

I have "Z for zachariah" To-be-read, not sure if I've read it before...

Loved "The Borribles". I got Roald Dahl's "Henry Sugar" as a birthday present one year- after I'd read all his other (children's?) books. The stories in it were more akin to 'Tales of the Unexpected' I think. I was also very upset as a younger cousin scribbled all over the front page in pencil.

We had 'Mrs Frisby' & 'Island of the Blue Dolphins' read to us in primary school, although I can't really remember the latter apart from the title ringing a bell.

onedge Toby & Tobias !!! Was this one where they signalled to each other using coloured lamps/ torches? It's one I'd LOVE to look up again.

I also really liked the Usborne Puzzle Adventures- Escape from Blood Castle etc Xmas Grin

nickeldonkeybethlehemsinsight · 23/12/2010 11:24

I've got henry sugar in the shop, too....

and Mrs Frisby Xmas Grin

It's like nostalgia every day in here!

aristomache · 23/12/2010 11:29

Love this thread!! I did Z for Zachariah as a set book at school too.

My fave books back then were nigel hintons buddy. your friend rebecca by linda hoy and many judy blumes!

I would read anything i could get my hands on, and remember reading one of my bothers books about three kids who encounter aliens at stonehenge - they are told that there's some kind of intergalactic war going on if I remember rightly.

Feenie · 23/12/2010 12:48

Thursday's Child was by Noel Streatfiel, I love that one too. There was a sequel, Far to Go, I think.

Feenie · 23/12/2010 12:49

StreatfielD

JaneS · 23/12/2010 12:54

Oh, I loved Thursday's Child and Far to Go! The other day DH and I were walking up the canal and he was wondering how the horses pulling barges got through the bridges ... I felt very learned.

Then it occured to me that my source was a children's book. Blush

I love the earlier Diana Wynne Jones books - Power of Three, anyone?

Btw, do you think children's books were spookier/ more demanding then? It may be rose-tinted glasses, but if I read something like The Dark is Rising against Artemis Fowl or Harry Potter, there's a real difference. The first has strands and strands of interwoven mythology and language that you're not quite supposed to 'get', but that creates an atmosphere and that you gradually decode and understand later on. OTOH, the more recent books just serve everything up on a plate: there's little mythology that's not already mainstream, if you see what I mean?

scouserabroad · 23/12/2010 13:02

Ooh does anyone remember a book about a boy who puts a plastic toy American Indian (would be Native American now but this was in the 80s!) in a cupboard, and the Indian comes to life? I think he ends up putting a few toys in there? I think the boy was called Omri but I can't remember the name of the book.

Littlereddragon, I think I agree with you, even books like Just William were quite demanding, although that may have been because they were set in the 1940s so referred to unfamiliar things. But then when my Dad was a child he read books like the Jungle book (not the Disney version Grin ) which I wouldn't have read as a child.

CommanderDrool · 23/12/2010 13:06

Scouser - think that story was called, bizarrely, 'The Indian in the Cupboard' although today it would be 'The Native Smerican in the Cupboard which ain't so catchy

brillopads · 23/12/2010 13:07

scouser I think the book yr thinking of is Literally called "The Indian in the Cupboard" Grin, Lynne Reid Banks

I also used to like Alan Garner books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen? and agree that they were a lot more... weird/ occulty

scouserabroad · 23/12/2010 13:09
Grin
GeorginaWorsley · 23/12/2010 13:09

Pre 1980's but anyone remember a book set in wartime Holland about two Jewish sisters hiding with a gentile family,old grandma and younger couple??

CommanderDrool · 23/12/2010 13:12

I seem to remember a sequel to Roll of Thunder called Let 'the Circle be Unbroken'

Also ' Underground to Africa'' and Turbulent term of Tyke Tyler - with the 'twist' at the end

nickeldonkeybethlehemsinsight · 23/12/2010 13:14

That's right.
and then The Road to Memphis.
and the Prequel was The Land. (how the father got the land in the first place)

nickeldonkeybethlehemsinsight · 23/12/2010 13:15

Indian in the cupboard is Lynne Reid Banks as well - it was a trilogy and guess what? i've got that in my shop, too! Xmas Grin

HughRinal · 23/12/2010 13:18

Best. Thread. Eva!

I lived off those cold war post apocolyptic novels
Can you remember story of Rag bone, hank of Hair - Nicholas Fisk,was it bit like Grinny, making robots out of humans?
Children of the dust - post nuclear, everyone grew hair had really small eyes and used telepathy

Tripods was my specialist subject on school mastermind!

BellaBearisWideAwake · 23/12/2010 13:27

Who said Paula Danziger? LOVED those - and by chance ended up in Woodstock, NY one Christmas staying with some friends and they were so impressed that I knew all the shops there and the Santa tradition in the town centre and we got to take part and it was JUST LIKE the book whose name I can't remember. The Something Express? About the bus that takes kids back to NYC on a Friday night as their parents are divorced. And then, just because I could, I looked up Paula Danziger in the town's phone book and SHE WAS THERE! And then later on my friends bumped into her and told her about how I'd been a crazed fan, and she loved it. Aaaaah!

nickeldonkeybethlehemsinsight · 23/12/2010 13:44
Xmas Shock

fab! Xmas Grin
I used to love watchign her do the book reviews on Going Live!

The set i've got in the shop has:
There's a bat in bunk five
can you sue your paretns for malpractice?
it's aardvark eat turtle world
the cat ate my gymsuit
the pistchio prescription.

it's £19.95