What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
This topic is about
Tommy and Julie
SOLVED: Children's/YA
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SOLVED. Old children's fantasy book about a boy and a girl who go into the dark woods and encounter a witch/wizard/magician/sorcerer (young, male, not old or ugly) who has been stealing children. Involves a flashlight/electric torch. [s]
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This isn't it, but its similar and I loved it as a kid.
Thanks for the recommendation. Hadn't heard of this! I need to do a Mary Downing Hahn/Betty Ren Wright marathon.
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Never have found this, still looking/wondering.
Rainbowheart wrote: "A Walk Out of the World?The Glassblower's Children?"
No, but those both look interesting.
Rainbowheart wrote: "The Thief of Always?"Doesn't sound like it, although I do need to read more Clive Barker.
This one sounds interesting, but no.
...Ayshe, this looks like a real possibility! GoogleBooks summarizes "A brother and sister enter the Forbidden Forest, overcome the wicked wizard and his henchmen and free the children held captive." Amazon reviews refer to children going missing, a brother and sister venturing into the woods, a guy/wizard in the woods who is keeping children as slaves, and "brave children with flashlights"! And there is a cover illustration (https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.c...) that is not immediately familiar, but does fit with the kind of "limited" drawing style I had in my head, one very much of a certain era. I am going to get this book to confirm, and because I want to read it again, but I think this is it.
...and my copy didn't have the jacket, but I remembered it being a dark color of some sort. This looks to be dark green beneath the jacket, and about the right thickness. It wasn't a *long* book, but substantive for an illustrated book: GoogleBooks puts this at 107 pages, which sounds (and looks, in the picture) about right.
Tommy and Julie by James S. Wallerstein it is. What a weird book! There's a lot of incident my brain had left out, and some of the particulars that I remembered were a little muddled, but this is it. I even recognized many of the pictures as I came to them.
Thank you to everyone who helped me look for this book - it even generated a nice reading list, as many of the books people suggested sounded interesting in their own right. But I'm glad I found this book. It fills in a weird and creepy hole in my childhood. I'm going to show it to my dad, too, on the off chance that this book may have been his as a child. I remembered it from a car trip and always assumed we had picked it up secondhand somewhere, but it's possible that I may have taken it from my paternal grandmother's house while we were road-tripping.
I had this book as a child and loved it. I kept my copy for decades but a few years ago couldn't locate it anymore. It's interesting the details you remember versus the ones I do. But I read or had it read to me many times. The book was haunting but alluring. I remember the old hag (witch) under the tree who tells them to turn back. I remember a room filled with delicious treats. I remember strange monsters and I remember the sorcerer having a crystal ball, not a flashlight. I also remember, as a girl, being very frustrated that Tommy got to be brave and adventurous and a hero while Julie only got to be the responsible one who followed Tommy into the Forbidden Forest because she wanted to look after him. I grew up to be brave and adventurous and have even been called a hero at times.
Kris, I think Harrie is not searching for another book, just got here after reviewing the linked book, perhaps from the thread showing in topics on the book page.
"I remember strange monsters and I remember the sorcerer having a crystal ball, not a flashlight."It's one of the details that stuck out from me. And rather snobby he is about it too, as I found when I reread it: he sort of mocks the children for it because they don't know what it is. You have to wonder about this guy - is he a time traveler? A dimension hopper? Gosh, what an interesting book. I can't say that I really liked it upon rereading it, and yet I'm glad to have it in my library. It is wonderfully strange.
What's the Name of That Book???
Books mentioned in this topic
Tommy and Julie (other topics)A Walk in Wolf Wood (other topics)
The Thief of Always (other topics)
The Thief of Always (other topics)
A Walk Out of the World (other topics)
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Two children, a boy and a girl, live in a village either long ago or in some kind of fantasy world. Other children in the village have been disappearing, so the two kids know that they shouldn’t go out at night or into the woods, but they do. (Maybe they think that, if they go, they will be able to find out what happened to the others?) Walking together, they come upon a house in the woods, which is inhabited by a young or middle-aged (but not old or ugly) man, who offers to accommodate them.
What the children don’t know is that this man is an evil wizard/witch/sorcerer/magician (I don't know what term is used in the book), and one of the first things he does is separate them. He locks the boy in a room, but the boy is able to figure out how to escape, finding some strange artifact in the process. Looking through the man’s house, he is able to find some kind of room (or possibly portal) whereby he finds the girl and the other missing children performing tasks, but they are all under some kind of spell that makes them like mindless vacant slaves. Somehow the boy is able to free them and to confront the man, who lets them go.
They take the artifact with them through the dark woods, a device that allows them to see in the dark. From a readerly perspective we realize that this magical object is, in fact, a flashlight, but the word is never used because that level of technology is unknown to the children. Eventually the object dims and stops working (as readers, we know this is because the batteries finally ran out) but the children are able to make their way home.