However could I have forgotten the Generating Stabilizing Electro Carbon Condensating Atmospheric Pro-Cyclonic Compact Dynamic Magnet Box?
There’s been some recent traffic at an old post, one I wrote back in December on kid detectives (and inventors, and magicians) and magic and slandering Encyclopedia Brown (and just as a side note: sitting across the table from Kristen Brennan at Bucca di Beppo’s is a delightful exercise in fragmentary multichannel signal-as-noise watch-me-for-the-changes-and-try-to-keep-up brinksmanship): Mike Tatreau came through, finding the book long since forgotten but rather tenuously described as having “this haunting nighttime flight home over moonlit countryside on a bicycle, and a midnight picnic of sandwiches in a field in the middle of nowhere.” Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Jan Wahl’s The Furious Flycycle! —Except, of course, for the fact that the flight is away from home during (mostly) the daylight, and it’s a noontime picnic (with iceberg watermelon pickles), and there is some haunting moonlight, but it comes later, and anyway, Wahl slanders wolves. But. There it is.
—Now we just need to find that Dutch? German? French? book in English translation with the Purloined Waldo cartoons for each bite-sized chapter-mystery. Anyone? Anyone?
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;-)
It took me four years to find a copy of The Four-Story Mistake" for HM, based on the minor difficulty that the only things I could remember about it were
1) I liked it when I was her age
2) On page hundred or so of the book, or maybe it was one of the sequels, Oliver was pulling purslane from the victory garden in the sun and whistling "Praise the lord and pass the ammunition"
I reread it when I finally found it (or, you know, when that wonderful kid at the Forest Hills BN who actually knew kid's books found it for me - Books of Wonder, anyone?) and that's still all I remember about it.
Well, that and it's called The Four-Story Mistake" and I didn't think it was very interesting.
Of course, I don't think Barbie or Brittney are very interesting either, so maybe she'll love it. On the other hand, for analogy that to work, she'd have to sneak encounters with The Four-Story Mistake" at friends' parties and school dances...