You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This HaBO is from Amanda (not me!), who wants to find the romance that got her grounded from the library:
I was using the public library as a bratty lying child to hide from my mom and read romance novels (so the book would have been published before 2000).
All I remember is that the heroine was continually described as having silver, silvery, gorgeously silver hair (granny chic, I guess) and the hero was a wounded British soldier that she was hiding and healing in some cave, using her colonial-miss-herbal-healing-knowledge.
I never got to finish it because my mom figured out what I was reading there and grounded me from the library.
Granny chic is in, by the way, with all the grey dye jobs I keep seeing! Can we help her out?
@Gloriamarie Amalfitano says:
October 27, 2015 at 3:30 pm
0
Silver-haired, herbal healer who shapeshifts into a unicorn????? Which books is that, PLEASE!!!!!!
Um – have you read The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle?
I have a hard time conceiving of parents who would take books away, and I feel terrible for anyone who had that happen to them. My mom had two strikes against her when it came to literacy (English was not her first language, and she was dyslexic) but stories were her emotional lifeblood and she never discouraged us from reading anything. In fact, SHE was the romance reader in our house and would have happily shared with me, except that at the time I was a total SF snob. The closest we came was when The Joy of Sex came out and she and my sister and I all read it together (and laughed ourselves silly at some parts.)
I have never restricted my kids from reading anything, just asked that they talk to me or their dad if something they read bothered them or if they didn’t understand something. We still swap books back and forth. I will admit that the worst punishment I could give my older son when he was little was to take away his bedtime story time, but I never took away his books.
My mom also got me a set of illustrated paperback children’s encyclopedias back in the day when you could get such things by mailing in X number of detergent box tops. I was maybe 5 years old and read those things until they fell apart. Apparently I shocked my second-grade teacher by explaining how the sun worked. Encyclopedias were so much more fun than Wiki, just because you could stumble across so much interesting stuff before you even got to what you were looking for in the first place.
EC Spurlock, Yes, I have read the Last Unicorn several times. But not in the past 10 years or so.
My mom was very supportive: She give the library permission to let me check out adult books when I’d read out all the interesting ones in the children’s section by fourth grade. Also, when they were concerned that I couldn’t possibly be reading as fast as my turnover would suggest (I read about 500 wpm) and must be skimming, they gave my mom a Nancy Drew book to read, then had her give it to me to read, and then had her quiz me on the contents. After that, they left me alone!
I’m guessing from the other comments here that among the older crowd, I am likely not the only kid who accounted for over half of any given Scholastic book order delivered to my school :->