Lily Rose May

A little girl, 5 or 6 years old, came in to the library today looking for a book that she had checked out from the library before.  She told me that the name of the book was "Lily Rose May."  I looked this up in our catalog and nothing came up, so I assumed that she was misremembering the title of the book.  I asked if she could tell me what the story was about.  To paraphrase:

"It was the story of the Princess and the Pea, and there was a princess in the castle who didn't like peas but then she tried the peas and she liked them."

Hmm.

I turned to my handy friend NoveList to see if the database could help me solve this puzzle.  I decided to try searching for "Lily Rose May" first to see what came up since the girl seemed to remember that particular phrase very distinctly, even though I couldn't at all figure out how this phrase connected to the story.  Sure enough, the first title the came up in the results was the book she was looking for!

The book in question was, "The Princess and the Peas" by Caryl Hart.  In this story a girl named Lily-Rose May dislikes peas.  Her father takes her to the doctor who diagnoses her with princess-itus and sends her to live in a castle where she discovers that peas are the perfect princess food.  It seems that she eventually learns to like peas.  Turns out that the girl who was searching for the book has remembered the little girl character's very distinct name.  The fact that both the book's description and reviews of the book contain this name make finding this book a lot easier than I'd originally expected.

Dog with Bunny Ears

Today a girl, five years old, came up to me and asked me to help her find a movie that she had once seen at the library.  She had never watched this movie before; she just remembered seeing it on the shelf at the library once and now wanted to check it out.  Naturally, she did not remember the title of the movie.  All she remembered was that the cover featured a picture of a dog with pink bunny ears.

??

A dog with pink bunny ears?  Doesn't that just sound ridiculous? Still, I am a professional, and I promised to do my best to help her figure out what the movie was.

I asked a few probing questions but, of course, since the girl had never actually seen the movie she couldn't tell me anything about the plot or the characters.  Her nearby father (not prone to being drawn to cute images of dogs in rabbit ears) was unable to offer any additional clues.  So I decided to take a leap and try searching for Easter DVDs.  I reasoned that Easter was the only real reason that a dog would have to wear pink bunny ears.  I turned to our catalog, did a search, and one particular movie's title jumped out at me:  "An Easter Bunny Puppy."  I was able to show the girl a picture of the movie's front cover and, sure enough, she instantly recognized this movie as the one she had seen.

I'm going to be prefectly honest with you:  This movie looks pretty bad.  It's gotten terrible reviews from viewers on Amazon and IMDB.  For the curious, here's a description of the plot according to IMDB:

"A Mystery writer is not thrilled when she's assigned to write a children's book, 'An Easter Bunny Puppy.' Out of ideas, she asks her daughter for help. Meanwhile, her dog, RUSS, the narrator of the story, digs up a priceless Faberge egg buried in the woods and takes it home with him, unaware that he's trailing a thief who stole the egg."

Still, even if the movie is bad it was exactly what this little girl wanted.  Most days it's impossible to track down a movie or book just based on a description of the cover and absolutely no other clues.  It felt kind of nice to uncover this mystery movie for a lucky library user. 

Bad Things

The other day a girl, maybe in the 4th grade or so, came up to me and asked for help:

Girl:  "Can you help me find a series?"
Me:  "Sure.  Was there a certain series that you wanted, or do you just need help finding something new to read?"
Girl:  "It was a series where bad things happen..."
Me:  "Oh, I know what you're looking for!"

Instantly I knew exactly which series of books this girl was looking for, possibly because this particular series has a very soft place in my heart.  The books in question were Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events."  Each book in this series describes the trials and tribulations of the recently orphaned Baudelaire children and their efforts to remain out of the clutches of their evil uncle, Count Olaf.

Admittedly, bad things happen is lots of children's books.  This girl's vague description could have described any of a number of books or book series.  But instinct told me to look for Lemony Snicket, and of course my instincts proved correct.

Mystery Book: Animals at the Market?

A father came in with his young son, about age 3-4.  Dad was looking for a picture book that they had read and enjoyed together before, but could not remember the title or the author.  I agreed to play detective to help him find this mystery favorite.  Here's what Dad told me:

"This book was about 7 or 8 different animals - actually, that might have been part of the title.  These animals all went to the market together and the cow drank all the milk, the little dog ate up all the bones...things like that."

The father was also able to show me that he had originally found this book in one of our browsing bins.  He even specifically remembered that it must have been one of three particular bins because they were in the area where his son likes to play.  Since our browsing bins are intended to be sorted roughly by the author's name, this gave me the hint that the author of the book likely had a last name that fell within the C-G range.

None of these clues rang any particular bells with me, so I turned to my friend Novelist K-8.  I started out by using two keywords that I had pulled directly from the father's description of the book:  "animals," and "market."  Typing these two keywords into Novelist's very smart database came back with several hundred possible matches, but after inspecting the first few search results I was able to quickly uncover the book that we were searching for.

The book in question was Eight Animals on the Town by Susan Middleton Elya.  Just as this parent described, this book tells of eight animals who go into town to find some dinner.  They visit the market and each animal finds something good to eat, followed by dancing and the animals' drive home.  What really stands out about this book - and was, interestingly enough, not at all mentioned by this bilingual father - is the way that Spanish words are seamlessly incorporated into the story, both in the text and the illustrations.

Dad was thrilled that I was able to track down the book, and his son was excited to see this favorite story again.  Success!

Green Dragon Book

Two boys, probably in the 5th or 6th grade, came up to me the other day. One of the boys was trying to tell his friend about a book he had read, but he couldn't remember the title or the author. All he could remember was that there was a dragon on the cover, and that it wasn't the Eragon series by Christopher Paolini.

 I asked the boy if he could tell me what the book was about. His response: "Well, the book was green..."

Hmm, not very helpful. But when he said there was a dragon on the cover my mind immediately went to another popular series of dragon books: The Last Dragon Chronicles, written by Chris D'Lacey. Each book in the series shows a close-up picture of a dragon's eye on the cover, and each book also features a different color. I was pretty sure that one of the books in that series was green. So I took a shot in the dark and walked the boys over to the shelf where this series is kept and, sure enough, the first book in the series (The Fire Within) was the book he had been thinking of.

Thank goodness.  If this hadn't been the right book, I might have had to resort to showing the boys every single book that we have that features dragons.  That's a lot of books!

Often it's really hard to figure out these mystery books when all we have to go on is the color of the book.  Clues like the plot of the book, the setting, or even the main character's name are usually much better clues because they better narrow down our options.  These clues are even searchable in reader's advisory databases like Novelist or even on Google, where book color really isn't.  Color also becomes tricky when a book has been reprinted with a different cover because the book on the library shelf might not match the image that the patron is familiar with.  Most book covers also feature multiple colors, and it's amazing how different colors in an image stand out to different people - a book cover that I might describe as yellow, for example, might appear blue to someone else.

Orange Curly Hair

Today a boy came to the library asking about a book. He didn't remember much about it at first, but we eventually tracked it down!

Here was the initial reference question:

"I'm looking for a book. I don't remember what it was called, but it's a biography about a girl with orange curly hair."

Hmm, not much to work with. So I prodded a little further to see if I could get some more information that would help us.

Do you remember what this person did that made them famous? "I think it was something about science."

Have you gotten this book from the library before? "No, my mom showed it to me when we were looking for a book about Davy Crockett."

Ah ha! This was actually a good clue. I knew exactly where to find books about Davy Crockett, and from this clue we could guess that the book came from a nearby shelf. I had a guess as to who our mystery person was at this point, but wanted to dig a little deeper just to be sure. We wandered over to the biography section to see what jumped out at us from this area. When we got there I asked one last question:

Is the person you're thinking of from today's time, or from a long time ago? "Definitely a long time ago."

Bingo! I was pretty sure that this boy was looking for a book about Marie Curie, the female scientist who did lots of work on the subject of radioactivity in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Curie and Crockett would be very near each other on the shelf, and we have lots of books to choose from about Curie so the odds seemed to be with us.

The one hiccup in this equation was that I didn't know what color Marie Curie's hair was. After all, every photograph I'd ever seen of the famous scientist was black and white. Fortunately, a Marie Curie biography jumped out at us with a colorfully-illustrated cover. The lighting in the cover picture made Curie's hair seem to glow a golden, vaguely orange, color. Part of the Giants of Science series, this biography was written by Kathleen Krull and illustrated by Boris Kulikov, and it was exactly the book that this boy had remembered! Thank goodness it was on the shelf, because it might have been tough to sell him a non-orange, black and white Marie Curie biography.

Mystery ABC Book

Today I took an interesting question from a patron. A mother was in the library and noticed our display of alphabet books, which reminded her of a book she had read with her oldest daughter years ago. She said that the book was wonderful because it only had one letter on each page and the whole thing was done in bright primary colors. She also made a point of mentioning that the letters themselves were large but unembellished - no fancy fonts, no letters created by objects, etc. We quickly established that the book she was remembering was not currently on display.

Well, there are a lot of alphabet books in the library so I knew this would be a challenging search. Nothing immediately sprang to mind so I turned to my good friend Novelist for help. This database (available at many public libraries across the country and provided for all Wisconsin residents through BadgerLink) is a wonderful resource for questions like this where a patron remembers a few details from a book but not the title or author. I typed "alphabet, one letter per page" into the search bar and got a whole list of possible books.

Fortunately the book we were looking for was only the second book on the list of results. We were also lucky enough to find the book was on the shelf! The book we were searching for turned out to be Max's ABC by Rosemary Wells. In this story Max's ants escape from their ant farm. Chaos ensues until his sister Ruby comes to the rescue. Each page features a different letter of the alphabet drawn in large, bright, plain type in the illustration and includes a number of alliterative words that move the story along and reinforce the letter's sound. While perhaps not what I would describe as primary, the colors used to illustrate the letters and the backgrounds are definitely bright and bold.

Both Mom and her oldest daughter were able to confirm that this was the book they remembered after leafing through a few pages. They decided to take the story home with them to share with a younger sibling.

Looking for more great alphabet books? Here are a few others that were featured in our book display:

LMNO Peas by Keith Baker
Bad Kitty by Nick Bruel
Alphabet Under Construction by Denise Flemming
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin, Jr.
Superhero ABC by Bob McLeod
Apple Pie ABC by Alison Murray
A Isn't for Fox: An Isn't Alphabet by Wendy K. Ulmer