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Journal SolemnDragon's Journal: help me ID a childhood book 21

Journal by SolemnDragon

All right. So i was trying to explain the memory of a book i read when i was relatively young to blinder, and realised i remember neither the title nor the author.

I do, however, remember some of the plot.

It was about a boy, a witch, and a friend or cook or partner or something of the witch.

The witch had a talking cat, and the other woman was working on an afghan and made the best fried chicken in the world. And always ate the gizzard as she cooked it.

The boy was a friend of theirs, i think? A relative?

Anyway, in retaliation for some foolishness of the town's, the witch took revenge. She turned all the tap water blue, the roofs of houses to ice cream (i think) but she most definitely turned the streets to foam rubber.

They were able to drive away because, as the witch said, "Of course. We'll take the Benz." Which had high thin wheels, allowing them to get through on the foam rubber.

Everyone else got bogged down.

Eventually, they met up with a policeman, who thought the kid had been kidnapped, but it turned out that the witch knew the policeman, had known his parents.
("I sent you an all-day sucker... it had a spell on it so that it was supposed to last a year."

"Well, " he responded sheepishly, "at least i remember the sucker." ) So the policeman joins them, he and the kid go to a double feature while everyone's sorting out how the town will apologise, and have three strawberry sodas each.

I don't remember how it ended, except that they do all go home in the end. And the streets get changed back.

I also remember a section about how one of the people in the town, if he forgot his wife's birthday, his wife would boil his coffee on purpose for a year, and put too much cinnamon in the tapioca all year as well.

So... anybody remember this book? I googled and have been poring over pages in loganberry.... (and found references to tons of other books i remember, like Mr. Pudgins, which i remember for the purple soda coming out of the bath taps, and professor diggins' dragons, which i remember particularly for the part about not wearing socks for the whole vacation.)

It's funny, what sticks, years later.

Anyway, not knowing the names of the main characters, where do i start to find out what this book was called and who wrote it?

This discussion was created by SolemnDragon (593956) for no Foes, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

help me ID a childhood book More

help me ID a childhood book

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  • ...that there wasn't a crack pipe involved, or some acid dropped?

    'Cause that sounds like quite the trip...

    Maybe it was written during (or shortly after) the 60's? :^b

    I shall ask all my sources.
    • children's books used to be a lot more interesting.

      *sigh*

      i can still remember one of the first books i ever read, it was called "my father's dragon," and was all about a kid who went to islands, and he had to pack carefully, like bringing ribbons and a comb to subdue a lion, and lollipops i think for the crocodiles. And he picked tangerines to eat while he was there.

      Children's stories don't need to be dumb, just interesting, so that kids will want to read them. It's a stealthy way to get them to practice re
      • AHA! Everybody knows it's turtleneck sweaters that are used to subdue crocodiles-- this book was obviously recognized as subversive propaganda by evil crocs out to trick little boys and girls!

        :^b

        I agree with you though-- children's books just ain't what they used to be. Come to think of it, neither are children. Or adults. Or GRANDPARENTS! OMIGOSH, it's a pandemic!

        AAAAUUUUGGGGGHHHHHH!!! ::runs off screaming hysterically::

  • It isn't a children's book, but was aimed more at pre-teen/teens. It was about a kid who ran away from home and decided to live off the land. He built a shelter by taking a very large tree that was partially rotten, and gradually burning out the inside like one would do to make a dugout canoe. He also learned which pants were edible and occassionally during hunting season would hide a deer which a hunter shot and then go back for it after the hunter gave up looking for it. By the end of the book, the bo
    • He also learned which pants were edible...

      Only natural fibres then, or did he learn how to properly cook polyester?

    • The book is My Side of the Mountain, written and illustrated by Jean George, copyright 1959. My copy is a paperback from Scholastic Book Services, #TK 1294, printed 1969. The story is in the first person, by a boy, Sam Gribley, who runs away from his large family in New York City in order to live off the land on land once owned by his great-grandfather in the Catskills. He hollows out a huge old tree to live in, lives off plants, bulbs, fish, crayfish, deer, etc., and trains a young peregrine falcon (name

    • I remember how nifty it was the way he'd learned by trial and error to prepare deerskin using oak tannin and further soften it, and I learned soooo much from the book! Some time after, I was reading up on the proper techniques for starting a fire by hand (or rather, the many nifty ways possible). Them frontier folk had the niftiest observations on basic chemistry!

      I remember that there was s'posed to be a sequel to the book, or of hearing some such, but I never followed up on it. Thanks for the reminder a
  • I got no idea what it is, but bits of that plot seem familiar. Problem is, many of those plot elements would fit three quarters of the books I used to read...

    Google isn't much help - I tried quite a few search variants, but nothing was remotely "kid book"-ish. The more detail you could remember, the more likely I could find a match. (Assuming someone has put some info about he book online.) I'm guessing mid to late 70s when you read it and it was probably released late 60s to early 70s based on he plot. Any
    • The benz was the thing that caused it to leap to memory, blinder was telling me about the first cars and i knew what the benz looked like from the illustration and the descriptions.

      I remember mostly passages, like the part where the cat was flattering (emma? gertrude? Whatever her name was) to get a piece of fried chicken, or the part where they were all sitting around in the benz eating cookies. Chocolate chip cookies, that was it i think. That the woman had thought to bring.

      THe witch was tall and thin. Th

      • Re:Hm (Score:1)

        by arb ( 452787 )
        Was it a long book, or a short one? Or maybe a collection of short stories? Pictures or just text? Can you remember anything at all about the cover of the book?

        It's amazing what sticks in our memories and what can bring them bubbling back to the surface... I remember one book about some kids who had a pear tree in their yard and it produced huge yellow pears. Can't remember much else about the book though. (Prolly an Enid Blyton book if I had to guess...)

      • Re:Hm (Score:2)

        by turg ( 19864 ) *
        Googling for "witch" + "benz" + "foam rubber" doesn't seem to bring up anything in which those three terms are related to one another. I'm guessing that the book uses a different term than "foam rubber" -- otherwise that search should do the trick. (or perhaps a different term than "witch," and this is assuming you're certain it was a Benz)

        Do you remember any repeated catch phrases from the book?
        • it was a benz. I remember, because at the time, i didn't know what one was, and had to go find out- i thought it was some kind of carriage.

          Well, all right, so it was, but i didn't know it was a horseless carriage.

          I don't remember catchphrases, it was a book not a story, and i don't remember whether it was actually called foam rubber, but i think that it was. It was not a popular book, just a wildly imaginative one.

          I distinctly remember the parts about turning the tap water blue, the part about the policeman

  • The last time I was trying to find the name of a childhood book like that, I found it here:

    [logan.com]http://logan.com/loganberry/solved-w.html [logan.com]

    My book was called What the Witch Left, apparently.

    Maybe your book is there somewhere, too?

    Hope this helps!

    Sarah

  • Go read The Phantom Tollbooth and let us never speak of your crazy book again.
  • ...looking at SAILS [sailsinc.org]? SAILS is an association of libraries south of Boston. I wouldn't be surprised if the Boston Library had something similar, but this is what I use.

    Although it has a login screen, logging in isn't necessary. If you have a library card from a participatng library, logging in lets you put books on hold at your local branch. It's pretty slick. :)

    Hope this helps.

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