My side of the mountain. Always have loved this book.

The Dollhouse Murders by Betty Ren Wright. It's about a young girl who finds a beautiful dollhouse in her aunt's attic. But then she discovers the dolls have been moving somehow, and it seems like they're trying to tell her something.

Even now as an adult, I feel creeped out reading it. Though parts of it haven't aged that well. It came out in the 80s, and the girl's sister has a mental disability, but she's described as "brain damaged." Yeah, that would never fly now. Regardless, still a creepy, exciting book! I think my mom got it from a garage sale, and I still have it to this day.

I remember a lot of books impacting me as a kid but the ones that impacted me the most were the Ramona Quimby novels by Beverly Cleary. I was impressed, even as a kid, with how she was able to write from a child's perspective so accurately.

Personally: Liesl and Po by Lauren Oliver. Something about feeling lonely as a kid felt relatable. One of my parents was sick a lot when I was growing up, the other parent didn't really know wtf to do with me. Books were escapism for me.

I wanted to be Liesl for a long time. Going on an adventure and making the world bright again.

Admittedly I'm a rather young adult, still in post-secondary. We'll see if this book sticks with me. I should do a reread at some point.

Run by William Sleator. I was in the Newberry Book Club in grade school and we were allowed to choose whatever we wanted from the library and read for as long as we liked instead of PE and study periods. This book made me fall in love with reading. I’ve spent roughly 45 years trying to remember the title snd about six months ago it snapped into my memory. I ordered it and re-read it. It’s actually not very good.

Edit—I should clarify that even though I just found the book, I have not stopped thinking about it since I was a kid. So, it did stick with me into adulthood!

This tripped a memory. When I was 8, I always took 2001 A Space Odyssey to school. I couldn't really read it, or understand it, that is. I loved the cover, I knew it held magic, and it was my comfort item that I had. My teacher saw me with it, knew it was a bit too much for me, and gave me The White Mountains, the first book in the Tripods trilogy. I guess it's considered a classic, so not obscure really, but that got me started into the magic of reading. To this day, I still have a special place in my heart for that series and that teacher. And I loved 2001 when I finally was mature enough to read it.

I didn't read it until I was 26, but The Illustrated Mum stuck with me as a heavily tattooed person with bipolar disorder raised by a single mother.

The Westing Game!!

Well, it's not a novel and maybe this isn't what you're looking for but: When I was in grade school I bought a little book called Sam the Cat Detective at a book fair. It's classic noir private eye style, except the detective is (obviously) a cat. It's really cute and surprisingly well written and I kept that copy all my adult life, revisiting it now and then.

After my house burned down last April I was overwhelmed with the idea of restarting my library, since I re-read my favorites fairly often. But I didn't know what to purchase first. Eventually I threw away the idea of getting any 'grown-up' books (I'm 40) right away, looked for Sam on thriftbooks and discovered to my delight that there were two sequels! So now I have all three.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle. Watching the parents marriage start to fall apart and how Paddy slowly transitions from the carefree experience of childhood to anxiety, fear, anger, and sadness as it becomes clear to him what’s happening. And also sensing how alienating it was to be the kid with parents who were on the verge of divorce.

All of my classmates (I went to a very small school in a very small town) were shocked when my parents were the ones to get divorced. My parents had shielded us from a lot of their problems and so there was such a bizarre shift in my family from one spectrum to the other once it started to happen. This book has stuck with me for that reason.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I couldn't tell you how many times I've read that book but it's more than a handful. I also loved the movie adaptation with Gene Wilder. It was very faithful, capturing the flavor of the book perfectly.

House of Stairs. 5 teen orphans around 16 awake to find themselves in a hostile environment, a building made up of stairs in all directions. They become part of an experiment (unknowingly) in which they are rewarded with food if they do certain tasks and punished if they don’t obey. They are gradually trained to become cruel and duplicitous. The 5 are: a popular, athletic boy; a pretty, shy girl who is a follower; a spoiled narcissistic princess; a juvenile delinquent girl; a boy who has a learning disability. Eventually the delinquent and the one with the learning disability rebel and refuse to engage, preferring to starve themselves. When the other 3 attack them, the experiment is ended. They discover they are being trained to be spies. The hostile environment is to train them to adjust to any situation and disregard human comfort. The training to be cruel is providing them with the right mindset to be spies and assassins. The two who refused are rejected but the rest go on to further training.

Wow just wow congratulations for making it to adulthood such a strong person

Hatchet !

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salaman Rushdie.

It was required reading in 6th grade and to this day it's still one of my favorites. I feel like it would be perfect for a kid's fantasy-adventure movie too.

Girl of the Limberlost

I don't even know the name of this book, but when I was 10 or so I read a book in some kind of dystopian future where all babies are basically genetically tailored to fit their parent's wishes. I think there was some other stuff, maybe the MC met a girl who was born the old fashioned way? But I don't really remember that, just how disturbing this novel made the idea of everyone being some idealized mold created by their parents.

A child called it was a really really tough book that mirrored a lot of the abuse I had in my own household. I read it when I was in middle school and in a better home but shaped me in a way that helped me embrace and get over the past. Horrible things happened to him that i really sadly related to but i felt understood and seen cause i mean abuse is hard to talk about and it can have a long lasting effect on how you connect with people . Connecting with the main character helped me realized what happened was messed up for sure but. some people are just evil and it was never my fault.

The Dangerous Angels series by Francesca Lia Block. I grew up in San Diego and LA in the 90s and early 2000s with hippie surfer parents and their friends. The series felt so personal and magical and torturous as a kid and the memories of those feelings stayed with me for a long time.

Another was The Old Kingdom series by Garth Nix. The first one, Sabriel, caught my eye bc the name is similar to mine and the girl on the cover looked like me. This one was the escape from real life into fantasy. It inspired me to have more courage and confidence in myself as well.

Everything else I read was really not for kids, but I happened upon both those series in the cool looking YA section of the library.

I don't know what it was called or if this book was even real, but I read it when i was 8-9 years old and I'm assuming I just got it randomly from the kid's section, someone probably put it there by mistake. I remember an edgy looking female goth with white-out eyes on the cover, half her face was a skeleton. The book was just a bunch of short stories, but they were disturbing as hell. TW cause it's probably not a children's book and I probably shouldn't have read this as a child.

>!Graphic depictions of someone disemboweling themselves and playing with their guts as they die, a girl who was too caught up in trying to look pretty that she cut her own lips off, one story where someone attempted to suffocate themselves by peeing into a toilet bowl full of bleach--I'm pretty sure I learned that peeing in bleach releases a toxic gas in this book--and one story about a glowing cat and fireflies.!<

This book literally haunts me lmao. I want to find it again just to prove to myself that I didn't hallucinate it. If anyone knows the book, I would very much like to know. It's probably this book's fault I like horror now as an adult.

Another one was Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix. There were laws against having more than two child per family and this family hid an extra kid under their house. Read the first book in middle school and couldn't stop reading the rest.

Black and Blue Magic, and Time Cat

I barely even remember the rest of the book. But for the most part it seemed like the kind of book where nothing truly bad will happen.

And then there's a scene where one of the characters is tied up and a huge pig described as having tusks like carrots saunters up. It sniffs the tied up character and out of nowhere decides to take a massive bite out of his side and the book takes its sweet time describing how his screaming goes up in pitch until it just turns to gurgling and he dies.

This book just goes Stephen king for two pages and then goes back to 'normal'.

Not sure if it is obscure or not, but back when I was in middle school I had read "Collusion Course" by Nigel Hinton and it's just an old read I think about from time to time.

There's another book that I remember reading back then, but not sure of the title, I think it might be "My Name is Asher Lev" by Chaim Potok, but not sure.

I don't think it's obscure because it literally won the Newbury Medal but I've never forgotten The Twenty-One Balloons (by William Pène du Bois) since I read it as a child.

I don’t think it’s that obscure, but Absolutely Normal Chaos by Sharon Creech had a deep effect on me. I had forgotten about the book for years, but I realized recently that that book, which is written as journal entries, inspired me to start recording my life and infusing it with narrative, which I do to this day. I connected with the main characters feeling of loneliness and her upbringing in the country so so much.

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Mustang: Wild Spirit of the West by Marguerite Henry is about the plight of America's wild horses. It led me to become an activist at around age 9 and I continue to pursue issues around Mustangs. I adopted a Mustang from the BLM about 15 years ago and she is a great little saddle horse. When I was a kid I used to write the author all the time and she always answered me; I still have her letters. I loved her other books as well, but this is the one that really stuck with me, although reading Brighty of the Grand Canyon to my kids led us to adopt a miniature donkey named, "The Reckless Peanut."

me and my little brain.

The Grounding of Group 6 by Julian F. Thompson. No relation to my actual life, thank goodness, but it held me absolutely spellbound. I've probably read it 20 times.

House of Stairs by William Sleater. It's sort of a dystopia. A group of kids are experimented on in this weird building that consists of endless stairs going up and down, and in order to get food and water they had to perform weird acts.

Treasure Island

Directly responsible for me being a reader. I thank you, middle school library sale, but my adult wallet does not.

Two On an Island by Bianca Bradbury (two siblings and their dog stranded on an island and have to survive/get back to shore); Knock Three Times by Marion St. John Webb, which is kind of light horror/fairy tale/fantasy involving children being chased by a dwarf encased in a giant pumpkin. Very creepy and eery.

Son of the Phantom. It's a novelization of the comic book "The Phantom" (also fairly obscure- although they did make a movie about the character, staring Billy Zane).

The book was completely unrelated to the comic book character. And honestly, it probably wasn't all that good. To ten-year-old me, it was the coolest thing ever. I sure wished I could have been the son of a costumed hero deep in the jungles of Africa, come back to America, become a hero on the football field, win the hand of the prettiest girl in school, and then move back to battle the bad guys (because it'd be my duty, of course).

I lost it decades ago to a tomcat who decided my bookcase was the best place to spray his ball musk. It's probably not nearly as good as I remember, so maybe that's not a bad thing.