Obscure children's books that you used to love

[LadyPlumpington]

Mine is 'The Island of the Skog' by Steven Kellogg. The DC love it too :)

What are your old obscure favourites?

The Bobbsey twins?

scouse the mouse by Donald Pleasance. I wish I hadn't given my childhood copy to my nephew, he binned it and I would so loved to have read it to my own DC's

A necklace of rainbows. Think they were a mixture of stories written by the author (Joan Aitken??) and retellings of traditional legends but they had the most magical illustrations using black cutout pictures. Copies go for £££ on eBay these days.

Ohhh, yes ... Children of the Oregon Trail! I loved it, but was shocked to realize as an adult that it is quite a slim book. It'd obviously taken me weeks to read.

Just had a rummage around the bookshelves and found this little lot.

I loved the Tripods and there was another trilogy by John Christopher called The Prince In Waiting, which was just as good.

Orlando the Marmalade cat. He used to have a watch on his tail

Necklace of Rainbows scared me. IIRC one of the stories was about a girl who went on such amazing adventures in her dreams that she became weakened in real life and died (I think). Beautiful illustrations though.

Amazing Maisie!!! I'd forgotten that I'd read that!

That witches book is doing my head in as Google is being frustratingly unhelpful.

Does Boffy and the Teacher Eater count as obscure? Margaret Stuart Barry was better known for her Simon and the Witch series but I loved Boffy.

Also the Jeremy James books, sadly out of print now I believe.

It is so nice to read that other people loved the Bagthorpes! They are such brilliantly funny books.

Magic By The Lake and Half Magic were great books. Also adored the World's End series and the Moomin books.

Basgetti - I've read Cora Ravenwing! I loved the name, Cora. Did she live near a graveyard?? Am I imagining things??

We also own 'Not now Bernard' . Read it to DS1 when he was 3 and thought it was perhaps more for DH and I

I've just looked at it must be back in print cos the prices are sensible again. Might order myself a copy.

My two DC love The Giant Jam Sandwich :)

Favourites from my childhood are The Dolphin Crossing, which is a book for older children about Dunkirk, and Oscar and the Ice-Pick, which is a very random story about a boy rescuing his friends from a palace made of ice cream.

Ooh Dee it could have been, I read a lot of Nicholas Fisk - Grinny, Trillions...I am off to Google.

Yes to Tripods. I have always been highly confused because I remembered a scene that was not in the books when I re-read them recently, but I think that was in the TV series.

Moon on the Water by Nina Warner Hooke

the paperback is on amazon for £170

I'm going to add the book I loved that I've been trying to find forever (as I do every time there is one of these threads!) in the hope someone will know of it and be able to tell me the name:

It was a book of stories, told by animals in the zoo in the evenings, after the people go home. Every evening a different animal tells a story. The main character is a little tiger in the zoo with his mother. The story she tells is about tigers got their stripes (a bit like the Just So stories). There is also an elephant in the zoo and some more unusual animals, including a sloth, as well as an alligator who is the villain.

I would love to get hold of a copy of this to read to my DS but no one has ever heard of it and I just can't remember the name.

Ooh bad editing - clearly not always confused, recently confused!

Oh, Children on the Oregon Trail ... the ending is just so emotional. A complete hankie-fest.

I had so many on here - Mary Plain, The Changeover, Sam Pig, Five Dolls in a Dolls House, the Gemma books, all the Melendy books (still love those), all the Lorna Hill ballet books.

A few that haven't yet come up -

Miss Happiness and Miss Flower by Rumer Godden - about a girl who makes a Japanese doll's house

The Case of the Silver Egg by Desmond Skirrow - this one is really obscure, no one I know has heard of it - a detective adventure caper

Trillions by Nicholas Fisk - aliens in the shape of multiplying gems

Re the blind boy trapped in the mine who makes contact with a spirit, I think that might be Annerton Pit by Peter Dickinson, one of my all time favourite authors

Finally, The Guardians by John Christopher, dystopian future in which Britain is divided into cities and countryside with Berlin-wall like fences in between.

Carbonel was a favourite book of mine about a witch's cat. Dd bought me a commemorative copy for my 50th birthday last year. I used to read it at night to my younger brother and sisters

Oh, and DH is obsessed by Grimble by Clement Freud.

Loving this thread!

I too loved Rebecca's World - I thankfully still have my now very dog-eared paperback copy. As an adult I came to the realisation that Mister Glister was basically Liberace.

Also remember and loved Olga da Polga, Green Smoke and Masquerade. (I looked up the solution to Masquerade online a few years back and it still made absolutely no sense to me...)

I remember loving a book called Alfonso Bonzo (think they made it into a kids TV series?). I also read this terrifying book by Nicholas Fisk - one of the stories I will NEVER forget was about two kids who found a hole in their house.They dropped things into it and they came back out of the hole changed and somehow alien. It was proper disturbing.

niminypiminy it was Annerton Pit, thank you!!!

DH remembers The Guardians.... not sure I do, but I do remember Chocky and the Midwich Cuckoos (John Wyndam I think).

Oh and.... dum dum DUMMMMM..... Bunnicula, everyone's favourite vampire rabbit. Yes, really.

I remember when I was in Juniors , I read a wonderful heartbreaking book. It really resonated with me but I have never been able to find it again. Not even on google/amazon etc. Its now at the point where I think I may have dreamed the book as I can find a book with the same title but its NOT a children's book. Maybe I overheard it being mentioned and made a fake memory based on a dream?

Anyways, It was called " a handful of blackberries" and the cover was a kid with a red stained face and hands with blackberry plants snarling behind him. It was about 2 best friends and how one of them dies of an illness. I remember it shocked me to the core, I didn't realise kids could die before that book and I remember crying and my mum trying to console me. She can't remember.....maybe I DID dream it?