When you find yourself trying to remember a show (or any works) that's on the tip of your tongue but just out of reach, come here - the collective brain of the TVTropes community can probably help. Post all the details you can remember (examples help). If you're looking for a trope, head over to Trope Finder. Have general questions about tropes? Visit Ask The Tropers!
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resolved Realistic Fiction about girl hiking Appalachian trail Literature
It was a middle grade coming of age/finding oneself novel about a protagonist whose separated parents had named her after a mountain in Appalachia, and in order to disciver herself she runs away from home to hike the trail. She meets a trail buddy she nicknames Beagle, who's an adult she forms a crush on (it's not reciprocated). At some point her distant father finds her and tries to convince her to come home or at least go back to mom.
resolved The Push Literature
Not to be confused with "Push" by Sapphire. "The Push" is a 2021 novel by Ashley Audrain about a mother who fails to bond with her daughter, who begins to suspect her daughter of unsavoury deeds.
resolved Twilight Zone story Literature
From the "And Your Reward Is Infancy" TV trope, an example was provided, a story from the Twilight one. An ambitious man murders some aliens who move in next door and receive this trope by one surviving alien, he begs mercy for his family. The twist is now the man is one of the aliens. I searched this like crazy, but could not find anything. The most popular search I get for Twilight Zone and aliens is the Monsters due on Maple Street and that is not the correct story. Please help, thanks much!
resolved Rainbow Bridge Animal Shelter?? Literature
I've been agonizing over this for YEARS now, and Google apparently doesn't have all of the answers, so let's try here! I remember this children's chapter book series from when I was a kid. A young girl named Sam would volunteer or work at some Animal Shelter that I THINK was called The Rainbow Bridge or something. I vaguely remember there also being a rodent creature - either a hamster or a guinea pig - named Sugarspice. Unfortunately, that's all I remember, but I would be thrilled if someone happened to find the name of this series!
resolved Mother Deliberately Stops Baby's Development Literature
I only read about it here but can't remember the page, it might have been a novel or short story: A sci-fi story where humans discover immortality and it becomes accessible to all. One woman is dicovered to have used the process on her own baby (making it unable to grow older) so she could take care of it forever and the baby would never outgrow her.
resolved Kid's book with a girl who sees ghosts Literature
This is a middle-grade book which was published no later than 2012. I remember a lot of things about it but nothing that shows up on web searches.
There is a girl who moves with her mom to a beach town and she sees ghosts. I can't recall if this is a new ability or not. There are several ghosts, and one is a slightly-older girl who is still wearing the costume she died in- fishnets are involved. This ghost also dyed the protagonist's hair (blue?), which the protagonist ends up liking and at the end of the book, she and a living friend dye their hair "Screaming Sally's Punk-Rock Pink." Also the girl's mother is an artist who does some sort of beach-themed souvenirs.
I don't think it's Saranormal.
resolved YA book about an eighth grader accused of child porn Literature
This YA book was written in the early 1990s or before. It’s written in first person, about an eighth grader named Sean. One day, while at a friend’s house, Sean and his friend were taking pictures of his friend’s little sister (I think she was wearing a bathing suit), and she was doing silly things, including kissing a balloon. When the pictures get developed, someone at the photo lab suspects child pornography and raises the alarm. As a result, Sean’s and his friend’s parents have to hire a lawyer.
resolved Young Spy Girl Goes to Japan??? Literature
I have just been hit with memories of this book i used to read obsessively as a kid. I'm pretty sure it was a series but there's one book in particular i remember and i am scouring the internet but i can't seem to find it anywhere.
ok so it's about a young girl who's a spy/secret agent and she gets a mission where she has to go to Japan and there's one bit i remember where she's on a bullet train and she thinks her blonde hair is making her too conspicuous and she like presses a button on her hat and a black wig pops out under it. she goes to this place where geisha do tea ceremonies for tourists and there's also stuff about traditional japanese beliefs about foxes? the more tails a fox has the more clever it is? or the more sneaky? please help i can't sleep im just thinking about this book
resolved Book series about American cultures (solved) Literature
It was mostly Indigenous cultures, but there was also a book about European colonists.
I don't know if it extended outside America. The only ones I remember where based there.
Each book followed a similar structure, with a question about the society the book focused on, and paragraph answering it, along with an illustration.
Each book seemed to illustrated by a different person. One book's art style was much more detailed than the others.
Edit: It's the "If You..." series
Edited by datadoggieeinresolved It might be named "Fish Girl" Literature
There's a work I'm looking for because I had gotten an idea for a new trope for the Mer Tropes index. I remember reading a children's book in my high school about a mermaid held captive in an aquarium run by a guy who puts up a God Guise pretending to be Poseidon. The book would've features the girl learning that she actually can gain legs on land, and upon doing so, she discovers that fraud that her owner is, speaks for the first time, and learns to live on her own among humans.
The book may be named "Fish Girl", but I'm not sure. I looked for this piece of literature in Mermaid Media, but didn't find it anywhere.
Edited by DeadlyEspressoresolved I don’t even know Literature
I don’t remember a whole lot. I don’t think I got very far into the book or series. I remember I stopped because a friend who was a few books ahead warned me there was a few too many s3x scenes.
It was a very dystopian like book. A heavily guarded village sorta setting. These two girls, either sisters or twins, were being constantly compared because one was strong and smart while one was gorgeous. I think for some reason the strong one had more suitors tho? I could totally have that backwards. Then there was either some sort of coming of age thing or a sacrifice ceremony thing. The strong one got chosen. Went on a journey with her sister and a couple boys. There were shadow beasts. I think her sister died? Oh and behold she left there was like a lot of marriage proposals. I THINK they might’ve come up to an another big city and done some vigilante shit but it’s been years so I don’t really know.
Found!!! Sea of Shadows by Kelly Armstrong
Edited by Zee-Trayhorneresolved Sci-Fi book where soldiers are kept in storage and are essentially immortal Literature
I read this book in the 90s, so it was from that era or earlier. In the future, scientists develop transporters, like Star Trek, but they are able to store the "pattern" of a person and then bring them back multiple times. The main character is a soldier who, after every battle, he and the other soldiers are dematerialized, and then when the next war starts, they're brought back to fight in that one. After a while the MC realizes that hundreds of years have gone by, and the people in charge don't consider the soldiers stored in the computer to be real people any more. The climax of the book is MC finding the main computer where the digital copies of all the soldiers are stored and destroying it so they can't be brought back any more. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
resolved Mid-nineties children's horror anthology Literature
In the mid-nineties, I read many horror story anthologies for children, although the stories often came from adult publications. The one I'm looking for has a sulfur-yellow cover with a pair of glum children peering from a poisonous-looking haze. I remember two titles from the stories within: "Battleground" by Stephen King and "The Ruum" by Arthur Porges. Other stories include a man who appears to be one hundred years old but is just about to reach his first birthday and one where a dodgy man is willing to pay any price for a specific house because a fortune he murdered to get is stashed away somewhere inside. I thought the book was titled Death Comes at Midnight but I can't find it searching for that title.
resolved A book about an orphan, a flooded earth, fedora-shaped spaceships, terrible fashion sense Literature
I read this book back in the '00s when I was living in Scotland, probably mid-to-late, but I can't be exact. The book was written in English, and I got it from my local library. The target audience was Tweens, probably 10-13. It's doubtful it'd be classed as YA for modern audiences; the content wasn't mature enough.
I'm pretty sure the cover was a picture of the main character crossing swords with someone and a big flare of light at the point of impact.
I believe the name of the book was the name of the protagonist, or included their name as a subtitle on the front cover. What that title was is long lost. I was certain it was "Johnny Z" or "Jimmy Z", but having tried everything in that vein (Jimmy, Jonny, Timmy, Tommy, X, Y, and Z), I'm stumped. As far as I remember, the protagonist was named this since he was an orphan, and they didn't know his parent's last name.
The book had a very Douglas Adams feel to it with a wacky futuristic Earth post-ice caps melting, where Earth's cities float, and the culture/fashions have been toyed with by alien races (though they have since stopped messing around, resulting in the current trends). Military uniforms are covered in polkadots and transports are in the shape of starfish. The book is full of fun little asides that explain why things are the way they are, giving contexts for the absurd things which happen.
The setting on Earth is that everything is flooded, with lots of mist and clouds, with everyone living in floating cities. Later, they get a lift to an alien space station, before the MC travels back to earth briefly at the end to save it from destruction.
The book opens with the protagonist being bullied in school. Everyone has these hand-held tractor-beam things that the bully is using to hold something of the main character's out of reach (homework? notebook?). They have silly acronyms for the gadgets, and the MC's one reflects its inferior strength compared to the bully's.
The protagonist is a young boy, or early teen, whose parents are both dead. He doesn't have much going for him and gets bullied a lot.
Every year, the other inhabitants of the galaxy send Earth a message asking them to join their wider community, though Earth refuses. I remember the messages coming down the prime minister/president's chimney. Earth's leader is an important supporting character; they are kind of the MC. Their second in command/deputy is a minor antagonist who tries to seize control of Earth while the leader is away.
The aliens send a message to Earth saying they want to have a tryout for a team of youngsters to save the universe. What is threatening the universe was never revealed, only that they needed to assemble a team. 4 or 5 human children are selected, with the MC being one and his Bully being another. They take off in a space rocket, reach and orbit the moon, before being met by a fedora-shaped ship which transports them to the space station where the selection process (try-outs) will take place.
While in transit, I remember them being kept in big glass bubbles, possibly with a view out into space. At this point, MC is visited by a multicoloured furry alien who ends up being on MC's team during the trials. There is a bit about burgers and how in the future, science has achieved delicious food that tastes like fast food but is nutritious and healthy.
The alien in charge of the trials looked a bit like a kangaroo.
The human children are split up into individual groups. The team the MC ends up on includes the multicoloured furry alien from before, a big three-armed alien, and maybe two others, one of which was a (non-human) girl I think he had a bit of a crush on.
At one point, it's revealed that the space station has some kind of normalisation field which makes everyone the same size, but in fact, the furry alien is actually really big, whilst the three-armed alien is very small. I also remember a rather novel aside where, when it's revealed that basically everywhere on the station is under constant monitoring, the three armed alien gets embarrassed and asks if they were monitoring when it did a number 12 (or some such number), and the book takes time to explain that humans are rare/unique/lucky that they only have to deal with number 1s and number 2s, but doesn't elaborate on what the other 10 possible types are. Witty kiddy toilet humour, for sure. There's no way I, as a pre-teen myself could have been so imaginative to come up with that.
They navigate the station via a series of wormhole-like discs on the walls, which you have to jump/fling/catapult yourself through. Personal size is irrelevant; anything can fit through one of these. These discs come back later as the method through which the MC saves the Earth by placing a pair on either side of the planet for their spaceship to fly through to avoid destroying it.
The selection process takes the form of a series of challenges that they have to train for. I remember one being a relay race in spaceships through an asteroid. Another was a sword fight involving special swords that take 800 years to forge and are passed through the heart of a star. Each sword is the maker's life's work.
In the room where they duel and practice with the swords, there is a diving board "thing" that protrudes over a gap around the edge of the duelling ring. The further along it you walk the more your worst fear feels real. The M Cs greatest fear is the Earth being destroyed. He is told only people with great "inner laft" can make it to the end. MC sneaks in one night and walks the entire length, falling off the end, where he meets his mum and dad in some kind of vision. They talk before he returns to bed. There was some form of repercussion for this since no one is supposed to go into the training room without permission/supervision.
Eventually, after all the challenges are completed and the Bully's team are disqualified for cheating, the MC's team wins. There follows a party, something causes the world leader to have a heart attack, he "dies", but the aliens revive him with a "microwave". There's also something which causes the Kangaroo alien in charge of the whole thing to need to take a rest, and so uses some kind of time-dilation device to take a very long nap without anyone else being affected. If I recall, he then forgets to turn it off, racking up a very expensive electricity bill?
After the party, they return to earth, where the world leader confronts his deputy/stand-in who has tried to seize control and replace him as leader. The world leader ends up getting stabbed. MC then duels the bad guy using those newly acquired sword-fighting skills and beats him, but the world leader actually dies this time. Pretty sure the world leader was a widower and also took his death well.
MC places two of the wormhole discs in space to try and save the Earth from destruction, since the spaceship he and his team have to take to save the universe has to reach super speeds to reach wherever it is they are going, and to reach these speeds it requires a runway that happens to pass through the Earth.
On his return, he chats with the Kangaroo alien (I think this might be where the aside about the time-dilation bit comes up), who offhandedly mentions "laft falls" which are trust falls without anyone behind you but you trust that someone out there truly loves you and their love will catch you. MC suspects "laft" is actually "love" just mispronounced beyond recognition.
They depart, the ship doesn't destroy the earth because of the wormhole discs, and the book ends with the girl on MC's team listening to two others doing "laft falls" with pillows to cushion them (which doesn't work since they aren't trusting). She then does a laft fall whilst thinking about the MC, but it's not revealed if she hits the ground.
Other curious notes:
- There was telepathy and telekinesis. - Terrible fashion sense (polkadot camouflage uniforms was just the beginning) - Doors which required the password "shaushages" - The protagonist's parents were revealed to have been friendly with the aliens but died in some (spaceship?) crash. - I recall there was a sequel in the works/about to be released (pretty sure I found it on Amazon) I don't know if it was to be a duology or a full series
Honestly, at this point, I'm tempted to try writing this book myself and trying to get it published. At least then, even if it's plagiarism I'll have found what I'm plagiarising.
Would love to find this book again, it's driving me crazy that I can remember a story so vividly but can't name it or find it. I've probed Chat GPT and Bing Copilot but neither were any use. Amazon and Abebooks don't show anything useful for the variants of Johnny/Jimmy/Timmy/Tommy X/Y/Z.
resolved verbally abusive mother Literature
First time trying something like this, sorry if it's formatted poorly! I randomly remembered this recently, but when I was in elementary school (I think), I read a book about a girl who I think was in fourth grade whose mom was verbally abusive. In hindsight, that didn't belong in my elementary school's library, but that's besides the point. I only remember a handful of details, so here goes.
-Like I said, I *think* the girl was in fourth grade, but she might've been in sixth grade. Definitely not a high schooler yet, at least.
-Also like I said, the girl's mother was verbally abusive, but I don't *think* she was physically abusive? Maybe she slapped the girl once, but I don't think so.
-I think the cover was blue, but I might be wrong.
-The girl had an older brother.
-There was a scene where the brother (I think, some male character older than the girl) referred to the mom's 40th birthday as "happy over the hill" or something like that.
-There was a secondhand shop thrift store kinda place where the girl liked to spend a lot of time, I remember she sold a dress her mom wore there and got boots of some kind?
—Related, when the mom found out the girl sold the dress she got really mad.
-The girl really liked caves, there was a field trip where she got to go with a teacher to see caves and her mom threatened to revoke her permission to go I think?
-When the girl told the principal about the abuse, she said her mom called her "stupid" and "dumb shit" (this I remember vividly, mostly because of the swearing when I was younger and didn't know you could put swear words in books).
That's all I can remember, if you know the author or the title that would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Edit: fixed spacing issues
Edit 2: it was Call Me Hope by Gretchen Olson! Thank you!
Edited by CupcakeGal25resolved Short story about a man being kidnapped by his future descendants Literature
I think he was going to do something that was going to cause some kind of problem for his descendants. (I feel like maybe it was a reputational thing, like he made a bad name for himself and all of his eventual descendants; but maybe I'm making that up.) So they go back in time and kidnap him and trap him on a ship (an oceangoing ship, not a spaceship) for his whole life against his will, to stop him from doing the thing. He resents his confinement, especially over something so relatively trivial, but he can't do anything about it. He spends the rest of his life on this ship, with his descendants. At the end of his life, he points out to them that they forgot to give him the opportunity to actually bear any children, so after all their effort to fix their problem, all they've accomplished is retroactively killing themselves. (He deliberately didn't tell them until it was too late, because he resented them that much.)
I don't remember when I read it, but it was probably less than ten years ago. I feel like the story itself was older than that, though; it had the vibe of classic science fiction (i.e. 40s-70s) more than modern science fiction. But, I might be wrong about that.
resolved 90s Teen Novel About Being Trapped in a Mysterious Town Literature
Hello! I remember reading a novel that was probably aimed at teens in the 90s or very early 2000s. After having some kind of vehicle-related trouble and getting injured, the protagonist got trapped in a mysterious town or village that I think was in a mountainous area. Every time he tried to leave, he couldn’t. It was like there was some kind of supernatural force field around the town, so that even if he walked for a long time, he would just wind up back where he started. He eventually did get out, though.
At one point, characters went swimming, and I think they had a dance or party on another occasion. Characters might have done some kind of traditional healing, though I could be confusing this book with a different one. At the end of the novel, there was an author’s note about how the culture of the townspeople had been inspired by the real-life Melungeons. The cover of the book might have been blue or green with an image of a person and white writing, but I’m not sure. I would really appreciate any assistance in finding the title or author.
resolved Mother abandons wolf pup Literature
When I was in elementary school my teacher read us a book where a pregnant wolf forces a fox or coyote or something out of its den and uses it to deliver. One of the pups has a deformed paw or something so the mother leaves it to die, but it survives.
Edited by CosmicGhost

I read this book in middle school, circa 2013-14? I believe it was the first in a trilogy or series but that I never got the chance to read on. All I remember is that the main character was a boy who was antagonistic in Minecraft servers, and then he got isekaied into the game and underwent some sort of character development in his quest… getting home or saving the overworld or whatever. One of the prominent characters was a villager who I think underwent a heroic sacrifice in the end?