Secondhand Vintage Puffin Chapter Book (Age 9-13) Bargain Book Box SP4269

Secondhand Vintage Puffin Chapter Book (Age 9-13) Bargain Book Box SP4269

Twenty-one children’s paperbacks from the 1960s to 80s, most of them Puffins: Tom’s Midnight Garden, The Owl Service, A Wrinkle in Time, Carrie’s War, Ballet Shoes, The Secret Garden and Judy Blume. Award winners in the covers a parent will remember from their own childhood. One stray adult title is noted at entry 13.

1. Blind Date — Priscilla Maynard — A set-up date that goes better and worse than planned. A Wildfire teen romance, as 1980s as its cover.
2. A Traveller in Time — Alison Uttley — Penelope goes to stay at an old Derbyshire farmhouse and keeps slipping into 1582, where the family is plotting to free Mary, Queen of Scots. She knows how it ends and can’t change it.
3. Dominic — Mary White — A 1970s Puffin about a boy, a man, a cat and a boat, to judge by the cover. A scarce title now.
4. The Owl Service — Alan Garner — Three teenagers in a Welsh valley find a dinner service patterned with owls, and an old legend of love and murder starts replaying through them. It won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award, and it is eerie.
5. Pastures of the Blue Crane — H.F. Brinsmead — Ryl, sixteen and alone, inherits a run-down farm in northern New South Wales with a grandfather she has never met. An Australian classic about family and race, and the 1965 Book of the Year.
6. A Wrinkle in Time — Madeleine L’Engle — Meg Murry’s father has vanished, and three odd old women take her across the universe to get him back from a planet where everyone bounces a ball in time. A Newbery Medal winner.
7. Tom’s Midnight Garden — Philippa Pearce — The clock strikes thirteen, and the back door opens on a garden that isn’t there by day, with a girl called Hatty in it. The last chapter is among the best endings in children’s books.
8. Do Goldfish Play the Violin? — David Henry Wilson — Jeremy James asks the questions adults can’t answer and takes every reply literally. Short, funny chapters for reading aloud.
9. The Diddakoi — Rumer Godden — Kizzy is half-gypsy and lives in a wagon with her grandmother, until the grandmother dies and the village has to decide what to do with her. Televised as Kizzy, and a Whitbread winner.
10. Ballet Shoes — Noel Streatfeild — Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil, adopted and short of money, train for the stage and vow to get their name into the history books. This is the television tie-in edition.
11. The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett — Sour, orphaned Mary Lennox finds a locked garden and a hidden cousin in a Yorkshire manor. She brings all three back to life, herself included.
12. It’s Like This, Cat — Emily Neville — Dave is fourteen in New York, fights with his father and adopts a stray tomcat to annoy him. A Newbery Medal winner with a real city in it.
13. 10,000 Miles for a Miracle — Kathryn Kuhlman — An Australian’s journey to Los Angeles in search of healing at a Kuhlman service. A Christian testimony for adults, and the odd one out in this box.
14. Fifteen — Beverly Cleary — Jane Purdy wants a boyfriend, and then the boy who delivers horsemeat for the pet shop asks her out. Written in 1956, and still accurate about being fifteen.
15. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret — Judy Blume — Margaret is eleven, new in town, and talks to God about bras, periods and which religion to be. Girls have passed this book to each other for fifty years.
16. Catweazle — Richard Carpenter — An eleventh-century wizard jumps into a pond and comes out in 1970, where he takes light bulbs and telephones for magic. From the television series, with Geoffrey Bayldon on the cover.
17. Apple Bough — Noel Streatfeild — Sebastian is a violin prodigy, so his family tours the world with him. His sister Myra only wants to go home to the house they left.
18. The Painted Garden — Noel Streatfeild — The Winter family moves to California, and plain, difficult Jane is cast as Mary in a film of The Secret Garden. It pairs well with entry 11.
19. Carrie’s War — Nina Bawden — Carrie and her brother are evacuated to a Welsh mining town and billeted with a bully. She does something there she believes for thirty years was unforgivable.
20. That’s Life, Snoopy — Charles M. Schulz — A paperback of Peanuts strips: Snoopy, Woodstock and Charlie Brown losing again. It’s also a good way in for a child who says they don’t like reading.
21. The Endless Steppe — Esther Hautzig — In 1941 Esther’s family was arrested in Poland and sent to Siberia in a cattle car, and she grew up there. It’s a true story, told without self-pity.