Old Children's Book Poll

[rachelmanija]

Here are some old children's books I have acquired. Please vote for which I should read next (or which I should avoid.) If you've read any of them, what did you think?

Poll #26528 Old Children's Book Poll

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 129

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Which books should I read next?

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Understood Betsy, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. A girl is sent to rural Vermont and experiences country life.
32 (24.8%)

Building Blocks, by Cynthia Voigt. A boy time-travels and meets his father as a boy.
22 (17.1%)

Juniper, by Monica Furlong. A princess studies with her wise-woman aunt.
50 (38.8%)

Mossflower, by Brian Jacques. Martin the Warrior vs en evil cat queen.
24 (18.6%)

Castaways in Lilliput, by Henry Winterfield. Three shipwrecked kids land in Lilliput.
17 (13.2%)

Midsummer, by Katherine Adams. Two New York kids are sent to Sweden & experience Swedish life.
20 (15.5%)

Orphan Island, by Laurel Snyder. Kids live alone on an island.
23 (17.8%)

Mariel of Redwall, by Brian Jacques. Finally a heroine.
25 (19.4%)

The Fairy Caravan, by Beatrix Potter. A miniature animal traveling circus.
19 (14.7%)

A Room Made of Windows, by Eleanor Cameron. Teenage Julia wants to be a writer.
18 (14.0%)

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, by Judith Kerr. Anna and her family are refugees in multiple countries.
30 (23.3%)

Hyddenworld, by William Horwood. Two kids find a civilization of tiny people and magic.
23 (17.8%)

Assignment in Alaska (Kathy Martin), by Josephine James. A stewardess has an Alaska adventure.
9 (7.0%)

Talargain, by Joyce Gard. Northumberland selkie fantasy.
45 (34.9%)

Comments

[hippogriff13]

I also read a number of books by Elizabeth Enright as a child. These included at least one of the "Gone-Away Lake" series, but I don't recall anything about it, including why or how the lake had gone away. Unless that was the book (not sure if it was by Enright or not) in which the child protagonists were friends with an elderly lady who'd been in some sort of accident in her teens(?) and lost all her childhood memories. So she was in this weird "stranger in a strange land" situation despite being from a bigshot local family and having lived in the same house all her life, since her conscious memories started from scratch at near-adulthood and she wound up never feeling like she really fit in with her family or contemporaries (most of whom I think were dead by the time she became friendly with the child protagonists). The old lady's long-missing memories were eventually triggered by some boating-related(?) incident near the end of the book, so her long-lost childhood was effectively restored to her.

Anyway, "The Four-Story Mistake" and "The Saturdays" sound much more familiar to me than "Gone-Away Lake," assuming the latter isn't the book described above. I think I probably read each of those two Enright titles at least twice (not unusual for me if I liked a book, since the children's section of our local public library wasn't exactly huge and I often resorted to rereading things I'd liked the first time around). I think one of those two Enright books--probably "Four-Story Mistake"--involved a quest for some means of getting into the multi-windowed cupola on top of the rambling old house the kids had just moved into, which had been mysteriously closed off years before. (The cupola, not the entire house.) But that vaguely "The Velvet Room"-like plot thread is about the only detail I recall relatively clearly about that series either after all these years.