And Now For Something Completely Different…

Okay, this one’s been bugging me, and seeing “Spirited Away” put me in the kid’s-books-I-have-known mood, and now it’s really starting to nag me.

Once ‘pon a time, I had this book. It had red covers and a black binding and I include that just because I remember it, not because I don’t think that people who go into a bookstore and say “I want this book…uh…it was blue…” deserve to be hung from the ankles until they turn puce.

It was about this girl, who’s grandfather had died. But she went through a (tunnel? hole? path in the woods? interdimensional vortex?) and got to a little valley, where her grandfather had prepared this little cabin, and she lived in it for awhile. It was kind of like a young girl Swiss-Family-Robinson thing, I think. Maybe. I do recall that there were mountain goats in the valley, and she named one of them Billy the Kid.

That’s all I recall. Obviously, I cannot take this sort of information to a bookstore, (see above about ankles and puce) and I don’t even have enough to google successfully–my poking around netted me “No Flying In The House” which I recall from the same time period and also enjoyed thorough, even if I cried every time when the dog-fairy turned into clockwork.

Ring any bells for anybody? I’d love to find it again.

Edit: Crap, now that I’m looking up the “What was that book?” sites, I’m starting to think of more I’d like to find. There was the one with the pet dragon (red and I think Welsh) who ate coal, but his human family couldn’t afford enough coal, and I swear to god, my memory has the kids stealing and feeding him bars of uranium. (I’m guessing this one is NOT coming back into print any time soon.) And the one with the two little witches with hair the color of moonlight and sunlight, which I know I enjoyed at the pre-Nancy Drew stage…my brain is sometimes like a library with no card catalog, I swear.

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