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Young adult novel with nuclear pool?

Jahaza — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:25:36 -0800

I'm trying to remember the name of a young adult novel I read (in the 80's or 90's) where a character is forced to do some work with radioactive materials at the bottom of a pool.

Name that pre-teen book!

hmo — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:38:03 -0800

I read this sometime in the 80s. It was a chapter book, just shy of YA. And it's title was something like "The 45th Thing I Love About Amelia" or "The 45th Best Thing I Love About Anastasia" (wrong number, wrong name). Oh, and at the end, the mom opens a closet door and there's a dead dog inside or something. I think it was first person, told from the title character. It was primarily about a girl, her family and friends. Throughout the story, her mother (and possibly other characters?) list off things they love about her or something similar, which is where the title comes from.

A pet or some animal dies, and some of the characters hide the body in the closet. At the end of the book, the mom is saying something like, "the 85th thing I love about you is that you BLAH BLAH BLAH" as she is opening the closet door to investigate the smell that has been growing in the last half of the book, and then BAM -- book ends.

What are some YA novels with feminist antagonists?

Mezentian — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 06:03:47 -0800

A friend and I were talking, and she was saying that there aren't any feminist heroes in YA fantasy. I countered with Ursula Le Guin. There must be others, but being a guy who mostly reads male authors I can't think of any others, but they must exist. If front-page titles were used in Ask.Meta this would have been called "Help me, PhoBWanKenobi, you are my only hope".

A broad definition of fantasy is okay, but tending towards dragons and stuff.
Novels preferred, short stories okay too.

Help me remember this YA book.

fozzie_bear — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 17:27:49 -0800

I've been trying on and off for years to remember this YA book. Actually, I think it might be a series, but maybe not. Details within. -Book is set in the US in the 1930s-1940s.

-Features a family with four (I think) kids, two boys, two girls. Their mother is deceased and they live with their father and housekeeper/nanny.

-All four kids have some kind of talent, but I can only remember the talents of the two girls.

-The oldest girl is about 13 and an actress. She is cast in a radio soap opera.

-The other girl is a ballet dancer.

-The kids pool their money so that each one can do something special once a week or so. The oldest girl uses the money to get a manicure. She realizes her father will be very angry with her and tries to hide it but he notices at the dinner table. The housekeeper sacrifices some of her beloved perfume (Nights on the Nile?) to remove the nail polish.

BONUS QUESTION:
-I have the nagging feeling this is a series and in one of the books the family inherits a female relative's house and the attic is filled with Chippendale furniture. Horrible but memorable detail: Cranky old relative was known to acquire a pair of kittens once a year and euthanize them once they grew out of the kitten stage. Also, if these are the same kids, their cousin(s) live in the area this house is. This may be muddying the waters, but it seems like the kids lived in New York City and the house was out in the Hamptons.

Novel about childhood in the American South

lunasol — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 13:19:55 -0800

What was this young adult (or children's) novel I read about a girl growing up in Appalachia or the Ozarks? It might have actually been two different novels. I would have read this book (or books) in the mid-80s to early-90s. I'm pretty sure it was all one book but it's possible it was two I'm conflating in my mind. What I remember:

- The main character was a young girl (maybe around 10-12), dirt poor, living in a small house in the Appalachians or the Ozarks.
- She's the only girl in her family (I think) and resents how much of the housework she has to help her mother with.
- There's one memorable scene where she's spent all day working hard and gets angry that her brothers get the first choice of meat at dinner, since she's the one who cooked it. She has an outburst and gets in trouble.
- Possibly as a result of this outburst, her parents decide she needs a break and send her to stay with city cousins, maybe in New Orleans or Atlanta. They are very glamorous to her. Her female cousin (aunt?) has never been awake early enough to see a sunrise, but has been told it looks like a fried egg.
- On her way to the big city, she shares a train with a group of soldiers headed off to war (WW2?)
- She and her classmates have to help with a cotton harvest (maybe because of the war) and get in trouble for jumping all over it (this is what makes me think I'm thinking of two different books, since AFAIK, there's never been a lot of cotton growing in the Ozarks or Appalachians).

I've tried just about every google search with these concepts and so far, nothing. Does anyone else remember reading this book or books?

All in the desert fighting a war against mutants with bicycles.

cereselle — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 08:39:31 -0800

There is some insane YA trilogy that no one can seem to track down. Anyone here have a clue? I'm asking for someone else, but here's the info I have:

It's a trilogy that he read around 2003. It's YA science fiction, but set on Earth. According to him:

The first book cover had a really graphic picture of a fish person (I think there were two) and the third book had a cover of a mutant dude with burnt skin and a bicycle helmet fused to his head. And the second book just had a picture of an open water tank in the middle of a desert with a bunch of other water tanks.

Also there was a guy in a wheelchair and the main character I think goes blind at the end of the second book because he spends the whole book in a cave and when he goes outside he looks at the sun. And in the first book he’s just a kid living in his parents’ house and then by the third book his wheelchair friend has his legs cut off so he can walk on his hands faster, his other friend has like 80% of her body completely burnt. They are all in the desert fighting a war against mutants with bicycles. It escalates quickly.

First book, some kind of weird fish girls moved in next door and I think they burned the main character’s house down. Like they were scaly people and their eyes were kind of buggy and large like an anglerfish. Like if an anglerfish was a person. But I think when they first meet them they look like people, all regular and such. No spaceships, just weirdness.

This seems to actually exist as someone else asked about it on whatsthatbook.com.

Things it is not:

The Toxic Avenger
Midnight Bay trilogy (Koontz)
Heroes Die (Stover)
Dune
Plato's Cave allegory
Anything by Lovecraft
Tomorrow, When the War Began (Marsden)
Eva (Dickenson)
Fist of the North Star manga
Graceling (Cashore)
The Tripods trilogy (Christopher)
War With the Newts (Capek)
The Windmill trilogy (Crew)
Dark Piper (Norton)
Magic Time (Zicree and Hambly)
The Amber series (Zelazney)
The Giver trilogy (Lowry)
The Stand (King)
Anything by Piers Anthony
Remnants series (Applegate)
The Uplift series (Brin)
Interstellar Pig (Sleator)
The Mall of Cthulhu (Cooper)
The episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where the swim team turns into fish boys
Lethe (Sullivan)
The Exile Waiting (McIntyre)
Dragonsong (McCaffrey)
The Book of Ember series (DuPrau)
House of Stairs (Sleator)
The Llandor trilogy (Lawrence)
Legion of Time (Williamson)
The Gone series (Grant)

Everyone on Ravelry is going nuts trying to figure this out. Google reveals nothing. Thoughts?

Help me find a YA Halloween book?

papercake — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 11:14:55 -0800

Asking for a friend: trying to remember a YA Halloween-themed book from her childhood. She doesn't remember too much, other than it was about a girl who was forced to go to a Halloween party at her Grandmother's (or -father's?) nursing home. She read it around 1989.

ID this book, 1970s YA edition.

Bourbonesque — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 11:20:46 -0800

Help, mefites! Y'all're amazingly great at tracking down obscure music and books with little info, so I hope you can help me. Two YA books, both read in the late 1970s: 1 - urban kid gets involved with a gang called the Scorpions. Also, his family was so poor he had to eat cereal with water. 2 - fantasy novel - there were goblins who were destroyed/harmed by butter. Any ideas?

What's the name of this short story about a boy who buys a ship's figurehead?

homodachi — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:05:28 -0800

Please help me remember the name of a supernatural short story about a boy who buys a ship's figurehead at an auction. Plot summary inside. I read this in a compilation of spooky short stories in the mid-80s, but the binding on the book was much older than that--maybe 50s or 60s.

Plot summary:

A twelve-year-old boy and his father go to an auction, where the boy sees a ship's figurehead for sale and his father agrees to buy it for him. They take it home and on successive nights, their house is beset by increasingly violent storms. The morning after one of the first of such nights, they find half-dead fish flopping about in their front yard. The last storm is so violent that they realize the sea is trying to take the figurehead back. They throw the figurehead in the ocean the next morning and the storms stop.

Find this YA sci-fi book!

PhoBWanKenobi — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 08:44:53 -0800

Yet another name this 70s/80s YA novel question--illustrated underground city edition! Asking for a friend:

A children's/YA novel with some black & white illustrations throughout (they have a creepy, nearly sci-fi Shaun Tan feel, maybe?) set in an underground city, or city under a city (maybe NY?). Cover shows a subway platform and maybe tiled walls -- or tiles make up the font? From 70s/80s? With a plain-spoken title like Under Ground or Under City or...a standalone, not a series. Not The Underland Chronicles, ‎"The City Underground" by Suzanne Martel, "This Time of Darkness" by HM Hoover, or "The Tutti Fruitti Connection" by Alan Cameron.

She says the author's last name might sound Russian/Eastern European but it's an American book.

Can this book be saved?

Shoggoth — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 17:27:28 -0800

An editor asked for the full manuscript of my young adult novel. The problem? It isn't finished yet. What do I tell her? Here are the gory details. I entered the first chapter of my YA novel in a contest in which it placed (hooray!). One of the judges, an editor for a Large Publisher, has asked me for the full manuscript (hooray!). The problem is that I've only got three chapters done (crap!). I should be clear that the contest itself did not require a completed draft -- it was just for first chapters.

I obviously need to tell her that it's a work in progress, but I'm not sure how to put it. Do I give her a projected completion date? Ask her if she'll still be interested then? Any other details? And for extra credit: Is there any hope that four months from now I will have a chance with her when I'm done?

Also worth mentioning: I have not published a novel before, and do not have an agent. Thanks!

Horses for courses... UK vs US English?

teststrip — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 11:55:53 -0800

I'm a writer - with a British English education. I've just finished a young adult novel that I'm polishing to go on submission. Should I be making sure everything is in US English? I presume the market for YA is the biggest in the States - certainly it seems like most of the agents are there. Do I cater to that or go with what I know?

I'm not just talking colour/color, but colloquialisms too. For example; I received a critique today from an American based author who wasn't familiar with the word 'twee' - and in fact called it slang. Would I modify that to quaint?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Another question about books.

Trexsock — Tue, 29 May 2012 03:42:40 -0800

YA fiction books NOT written from a female's 1st person perspective (POV)? I'm a female and during the last couple weeks I've read through a few YA novels (Divergent, The Hunger Games, The House of Night mostly) and although I thoroughly enjoyed either series to some degree, there is something about the fact the fact that they have all written from the same perspective (teenager girl 1st person POV) that, well, it doesn't bother me as I actually do enjoy how it works, but makes me wonder what exactly is out there.

Basically what I'm looking for are books which are NOT written from the perspective of a young woman/teenager. Not because I actually have anything against that (which I obviously don't, as pointed out above) but mostly out of being rather curious about the opposite, a MALE 1ST PERSON POV, especially when it comes to ROMANCE/introversion from a guy's point of view.

What I enjoy in these books:

- Dystopic/post-apocalyptic society (although pretty much any interesting setting is fine by me)
- A dash of romance.
- YA goodness. (which is a very general sort of thing, but books targeted at younger adults/teenagers seem to pick my interest the most)

I'm really not too picky, just looking for new interesting things to read. Thanks a lot in advance for the suggestions!

Yet another "what is this book I read as a kid" post.

Occula — Thu, 17 May 2012 10:10:26 -0800

Help me identify a young adult book I read in the late 70s or early 80s about a boy lost in the wilderness. Here is what I remember: at the beginning of the story, the main character was a (young teenage?) boy perceived by his father as weak or sissified. The boy had secretly built a raft all by himself, which was tethered on a body of water near their house.

One day the boy was hanging out on his raft, perhaps after an argument with his father, and somehow the raft and boy drifted off downriver and ended up a very long way from home in a wilderness area. I'm not sure if perhaps the boy fell asleep and the raft's tether broke? Perhaps there was a flash flood?

At any rate, the boy was left to walk home by himself. I remember the story dealing with the frightfulness of the raging river and the boy's cold and hunger, including digging up and eating wild onions in particular. During his long walk home, he learned tons of resourcefulness and self-sufficiency. He *might* have been joined by a dog along the way.

That's really all I remember! Help?

Help me remember a book?

dotgirl — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 11:51:13 -0800

Help me locate a book I read when I was 10 or so? I picked up a random YA novel at a thrift store when I was 10, and have been trying, off and on, to find it again for many years.

Here's what I remember:
The cover had a large picture of a girl on the phone, looking scared. At the bottom, smaller, was a different girl, prone, presumably dead. She may have been partially in a phone booth.

The plot was about a girl, 16 or so, high-school age, who moves back to her hometown after some time away. She reconnects with her best friend, who is almost immediately killed for some reason to do with drugs.

I seem to remember the murder method being that she had air injected into her veins.

That's all I remember. No character names or anything.

Help me, AskMeFi, you're my only hope!

What was this weird YA novel about alternate realities?

showbiz_liz — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:50:41 -0800

Name that YA novel: a prince whose people live in a dream world and shun reality meets a princess who can make stuff from HER dreams come true in real life, and they go on some sort of adventure. All I really remember from this book is the premise, which is that there were two kind of stereotypical fantasy-type kingdoms. In one, the inhabitants all have the power to live inside their minds and interact with each other in this communal fantasy world, so they all 'live' in palaces but in reality they spend all day lying on the ground amid ruins. There's a prince from that kingdom who refuses to do any of that, and just lives in the ruins. In the other kingdom, they have the power to make things in their minds real, and they mostly keep it extremely well-regulated, but there's a princess who either can't or won't control her powers and makes things like massive storms or, like, elephant rampages happen. The prince is kind of shy and the princess is headstrong.

All I remember beyond that is that they meet, somehow go to a strange land together where ~all is not as it seems~, and have an adventure. I think the prince dies at some point and is later revived, and he describes death as basically being like he's a brain floating in grey nothingness. But that's about all I remember.

I would have read this book at least 10 or 12 years ago. Please help me out here because this has been driving me nuts today.

YAYA (yet another young adult) Fiction ID

audi alteram partem — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 05:46:23 -0800

Please help me identify this young adult novel (comatose teen explores afterlife with long-dead caveman). I’ve been googling plot elements from this book for years, and the closest I’ve come is a Yahoo Answers question that confirms my vague description but offered no book suggestions.

It isn’t among the afterlife stories discussed in this askmefi.

The book (as I can recall): Read during the late 1980s or early 1990s. Possibly purchased through the Scholastic book sale. Protagonist was a young teenage boy who had been in a car (?) accident. While in a coma, he awakens in a sort of afterlife/limbo. He teams up with a dead teen girl and a man who had been in the afterlife since neolithic times. They travel the land of the dead trying to get the boy back to his life. That’s all I recall.

Looking for a book, can't recall the title or author.

Rosengeist — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:36:40 -0800

I'm looking for a book I read as a pre-teen. It's been years since I read it and I can't recall the name of the writer, or the title of the work. I recall a little of the plot, but not much. As far as I recall, it was about a girl living in a small town in the east coast who falls into a pit, or cave, something like that, and is saved by a man made of earth and stone. They kind of end up falling for one another, and she finds out he was a soldier in the revolutionary war...or at least he was alive at that point. I don't remember the specifics of his background, just that he became what he was because he traded his life for his fathers. I think the girl may have also had another love interest who was pretty abusive and who may have posed a threat, but this might be me throwing in overtones of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" since the whole story had a pretty BatB feel to it.

In the end, their was some curfluffle that basically made the hero and heroine decide that the cave he lived in had to be closed off from the rest of the world. In order to keep anyone else from getting in trouble with this cave, they were going to blow it up, isolating the hero and heroine from each other for ever.

Not sure if I'm recalling this correctly, but I think the other love interest that was threatening to the girl may have died...not sure...

Anyway, I hope this sparks someone's memory, and hopefully, you guys can help me out! Thanks!

Its breaking my heart that I can't introduce her to Tiffany Aching

PercyByssheShelley — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 23:53:29 -0800

I am looking for YA books with a female main character, that will pass muster with very conservative Christian parents. At work today I was discussing the Bechdel Test with a colleague, and he told me that his 13 year old daughter has read the same Brian Jacques book five times because its the only one with a female main character.

He asked if I could recommend anything she might like, with a caveat: she likes fantasy/adventure, but they're practicing Christians so she's not allowed to read anything with magic.

I came up with Coraline by Neil Gaiman, and the Hunger Games, then drew a complete blank. There have to be others, right?

Help me remember this darkish YA novel

rhiannonstone — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:45:47 -0800

Do you remember this YA book about two girls from different worlds spending a life-changing summer on the beach together? With a small bit involving Tarot cards? It's not Judy Blume's Summer Sisters or Francesca Lia Block's The Hanged Man. The book is about a girl who moves to a beach town with her father one summer (or maybe they're just on a long vacation?) and meets another girl about her age and they become sort-of friends, in that competitive and catty way that girls in YA novels do (they fight over a boy at some point, a boy they met either water-skiing or jetskiing or somethinging on the beach). The other girl was either older or just came off as more sophisticated because she was from a rich family. She kind of strange, and had a deck of Tarot cards that her maid? nanny? taught her to read. I recall she kept them wrapped up in black silk. Other than the Tarot deck the story didn't involve magic or mysticism, but I do remember it being generally dark. There's a scene where someone (the rich girl or her mother?) freebases cocaine.

Also, I half-remember associating the word "Freedom" with the book, either as the name of the town, or the name or nickname of one of the characters, maybe? I think there was also a 4th of July celebration featured. Maybe.

I read it around the same time I read Constance C. Greene's Monday I Love You, which was published in the late 80s, but since I checked them both out from the library I don't know if they came out around the same time. I think the cover might have had a picture of one of the girls sitting on a hill with the sea in the background, but I could be mixing it up with another book.

vampire romances are OK if they are good

NoraReed — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:59:43 -0800

Give me your best YA and children's fiction. I just got a job in a bookstore focused on children's/YA books. I've been reading things sort of at random off the shelves based on them seeming interesting.

I'm mostly a sci-fi/fantasy reader, but I think that's as much habit as anything else. Stuff I already have read and liked include The Hunger Games, Abhorsen/The Old Kingdom, Harry Potter, Little Brother and Tamora Pierce's stuff, particularly the more recent Tortall stuff (Trickster and Beka Cooper). I like interesting worlds, good characters (particularly female ones), stuff like that. Anything from the fluff --> heaviness scale is okay. The only thing I really have trouble with is dumb/oversimplified female characters and books where everyone is unlikeable so I can't really root for anyone*.

If there are any must-read YA/children's books that don't seem to fit these requirements, feel free to post 'em.

We also have a ton of children's/early reader stuff (James and the Giant Peach/Lemony Snicket level) and a big wall of picture books, so if there's anything that's, you know, spectacular in those areas, tell me about them too!

*I do, however, tend to get caught up in action, so if they're exciting enough I might not notice those flaws. I'd already finished Mockingjay by the time I realized I didn't actually like anyone in the Hunger Games trilogy except Cinna.

Forgotten book title, YA fiction about erasing books

hades — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 12:21:36 -0800

Yet another forgotten-book-from-my-youth question. Probably in the early/mid-80s I read a book where there was a device of some sort which could either change the contents of a book or erase it completely. I don't remember the mechanism, but I'm pretty sure that when this device was used, it affected all copies of the book it was being used on, everywhere. So you could change the name of a character in your copy of the book, and in all the libraries across the world, that would now be the character's name. I don't remember if it also affected everyone's memory of the book or not, so that the new name would always have been that character's name. I'm pretty sure the protagonist is male and around 16 years old -- at one point I think he drives a truck with a trailer. Or maybe he has a librarian friend who drives a truck with a trailer, and he's impressed at how well she can drive it in reverse, which is explained by her having driven the bookmobile or something.

The one thing I'm pretty sure I remember right is that the protagonist's favorite book is "Carry On, Mr. Bowditch", and the plot is at least in part driven by his either noticing a change having been made to it or wanting to stop the antagonist before any changes can be made. Maybe he notices that Nathaniel Bowditch's name has been changed?

The antagonist may have been a stepfather, or mother's new boyfriend. There may be two protagonists, a brother and sister.

On reflection, the device must have needed the original manuscript of a book to work, or something like that, because I remember there being a race-against-time element to the plot, and that wouldn't make any sense if the person with the device could just walk into a bookstore and use it on the first copy of the book he could find.

It definitely isn't anything by Jasper Fforde, but I think reading one of those is what reminded me of this.

Does this ring any bells? Normally I'm pretty good with Google, but since the only detail I recall with any clarity is "Carry On, Mr. Bowditch", all my search results are talking about that book, not the one I'm looking for.

Thanks!

YA Time Travel -- wish I could recall book

kidelo — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:04:06 -0800

Help me find the title of this YA book I've been searching for for 30 years! Two female friends time travel back to old New York. Published in the late '60's or early '70's in hardcover. That's all I recall, except that I loved it. Thanks!

Seeking YA fiction about special-needs student

SillyShepherd — Fri, 07 May 2010 05:09:27 -0800

Seeking YA book - Main character is special-needs student enrolled in BOCES... The book, for young-adult readers, came out in the late 70s or early 80s. If I recall, the cover shows an apprehensive-looking girl with a shoulder bag, kind of looking over her shoulder. The story takes place (and is authored by a teacher) in NY state, and the main character is a special-needs student enrolled in a BOCES program, who attends the same school with her sister who is not special-needs. She embarrassed her sister by singing aloud in the hallway one day. I think at one point, after a bad day, she takes a bus or train back to her old school and gets lost.

Help me ID this book!

halfguard — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:32:04 -0800

BookFilter: Please help me identify a YA sci-fi book I read as a teenager in the 1980s. Full description inside. Plot: a group of boys in a foster home are sent by the (evil) people who run the home on a journey into a fantastic world. They have some kind of powerful vehicle to travel in. Eventually at least one of the boys gains psychic powers. The last part of the book is about the struggle between the boys and the people who sent them on the journey.

I think the author's name was Wallenstein or something very similar to that.

Thanks for your help. Although I read this over and over as a child, I'm beginning to think I dreamed this book up...