Identify-a-book-filter: I'm trying to remember a children's/young adult book that I likely read 15-20 years ago in Australia. It was about a ~13 year old girl who went to a Greek island with her archaelogist parents (for a year/the summer?) and something magicky happened.
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posted by jacalata
on Jan 4, 2013 -
12 answers
Name that YA book or story! Young boy/teen is in a cabin or hut in the Arctic. There is also a murderer. It may be the kind of thing where there are a few people in the cabin, and one of them is a murderer, and people are being killed one by one. Very sketchy details follow.
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posted by Alaska Jack
on Dec 18, 2012 -
6 answers
Please help me find the title of this book for a friend. It's about a woman and her husband who are involved in a plane crash. Everyone aboard was killed, except for the couple. The wife is an art dealer.
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posted by erasorhed
on Oct 25, 2012 -
5 answers
I want to write a children's picture book, submit it to a publisher, and get it published. Now what?
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posted by booksherpa
on Sep 26, 2012 -
10 answers
Looking for lists of memes, themes and repeated elements in children's stories that I can use in entirely new stories I'm making up for actual children.
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posted by booksherpa
on Sep 13, 2012 -
8 answers
Help me remember this book that I checked out of the library... ghost story set in New England (I think Maine, but I'm not positive), begins in more or less present day, with an old woman telling the story of the summer she was a teenager and fell in love for the first time. Most of the story takes place in that summer, but also a lot of scenes from the mid-to-late 1800s.
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posted by Kriesa
on Aug 21, 2012 -
3 answers
Excellent Action Scenes In Books? I'm looking for examples of tense, fast paced action sequences in novels and short stories. The written equivalent to the cinematic on-the-edge-of-your-seat-oh-crap-the-person-may-die-how-will-they-escape thing. Bonus if the situation is complex yet reads like a clear, clockwork machine.
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posted by The Whelk
on Feb 8, 2012 -
42 answers
What are some books or movies where the story is essentially told backwards? Ideally, ones that put a big initial event at the end of the narrative.
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posted by gottabefunky
on Dec 19, 2011 -
51 answers
Please help me find a story i read about 10 years ago.
In a dystopian world, criminals are not locked up, but instead are marked and ordinary people are not allowed to interact with them.
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posted by revikim
on Nov 10, 2011 -
7 answers
I am looking for a chapter book I read as a kid in the 1970s/1980s in which a princess and her family have to move out of their ancestral home and instead rent all the houses on a street to hold all their things that used to be in the castle. It was kind of an adventure/mystery story after that, I think involving something with the family possessions. Anyone know the title of this book please?
posted by cmp4Meta
on Aug 12, 2011 -
2 answers
I'm trying to come up with the name of a short story I read eight or ten years ago. It is a first-person narrative of the domestic life of a cynically detached man who lives with his wife and kid.
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posted by churl
on Jun 4, 2011 -
2 answers
ForgottenStoryFilter! Asking for a friend because the details are familiar to me too, but I can't place where *I* could have read it...
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posted by bibliogrrl
on Apr 3, 2011 -
5 answers
Help me remember this book (murder mystery) we read in grade school, with only vaguely remembered details (aka what askme does best)
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posted by chndrcks
on Jun 24, 2010 -
7 answers
I'm looking for a book I read a long time ago. It was set in some hilly country, quite cold, somewhere like Iceland. A boy working on his farm developed some sort of need for a quest (but I have no idea what this actually was). He had a 'typically' Viking name, and there was a girl involved, physical but seeming quite ethereal. Possibly they were somehow married (though they were—I don't know, but less than twelve, so when I say 'married' I mean one of those close friendships characters in children's books have with destined soulmates). Things I seem to remember but may be mixing up with other books: a sword, longships arriving (the settlers were Viking too).
There were gods around, because Loki was quite prominently featured in the story while the boy was questing alone. I think this quest had a fairly pathetic basis, and that's one of the things that made the story interesting.
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posted by westerly
on Jun 20, 2010 -
10 answers
Name that kids book, little boy drowns playing in the water, kindly old man performs CPR on him, saying something like "blow the air in, push the water out".
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posted by nomisxid
on Feb 19, 2010 -
9 answers
Looking for a circa late 70's early 80's Children's Picture Book with faceless nuns.
Hoping someone in the MeFi shared my same crazed childhood where aunts gave books for Christmas
every.year
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posted by will wait 4 tanjents
on Sep 22, 2009 -
4 answers
Trying to find a friend find a book she remembers reading as a child, fantasy genre, wizards, kids with magic, and it was a trillogy! Better description (kinda) inside
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posted by Syntoad
on Apr 10, 2009 -
5 answers
ID That Story: novel (novella? short story?) in which a man is standing in line. Pretty much the entire story is his experience while waiting in line. It's a future/dystopia story. The man is waiting in line to make a complaint. He falls in love with the girl in front of him, though she's not allowed to turn and look at him. It's a parable about overpopulation. It was probably written in the 60s or 70s. That's all I remember.
posted by grumblebee
on Nov 20, 2008 -
8 answers
So I wanna write a horror novel. God knows where I start. How can I make it scary, as opposed to a soppy middle of the road thriller?
posted by bobbyone
on Apr 19, 2008 -
30 answers
[BookFilter] Help me find the name/author of this short story. The story is about a president and his ministers. When a minister commits a mistake he gets his head chopped off. The sign one has commited a (fatal) mistake is because the president sends you a box for your head. Depending on the status and importance of the minister is the magnificence of the boxes.
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posted by edmz
on Dec 11, 2007 -
1 answer
Children's Story Filter: I'm trying to remember a picture book about a train conductor who had retired. He ended up building a working train that ran through a park, and he gave children tours.
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posted by cynthia_rose
on Feb 19, 2007 -
3 answers
Another "what is this story I read as a child?" question: All I can remember was there was a beautiful young girl who was locked in a closet or shed by her mother-figure-type person, who then had to bathe herself by moonlight by rubbing an apple over her skin. Sound familiar?
posted by greta simone
on Jul 26, 2006 -
8 answers
I was looking at mathowie's weblog:
a.wholelottanothing.org, and he talked about the "theme" of the baby shower they just had - "bring your absolute favorite book you owned as a child". What was yours?
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posted by slactoid
on Feb 28, 2005 -
67 answers
