Recovering a lost book memory

A year or two ago, I was reminded for some reason of a set of children’s books I had read long ago. But I couldn’t remember the titles or the author or really that much about them.

I remembered that the family in them was Swedish. And that in one of the books there was a scene where two girls went to visit their cool aunt at the farm and she taught them to make paper dolls- the ones where you fold paper accordion style and then when you cut them out all the people are holding hands.

Oh, and based on where I remember the book being located on the library shelves, the author’s name was somewhere in the middle of the alphabet.

Not a lot to go on.

I tried some Googling and didn’t get anywhere. I asked my sister, since she had read many of the same library books I had. But she didn’t know what I was talking about.

I thought at first that it would come back to me at some point when I wasn’t thinking about it. But a long time passed and I still didn’t remember. I decided that I really had forgotten and that unless I happened to come across the books somewhere they were probably lost forever.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I my first thought on waking up one morning was the phrase “The Crystal Tree”. I was momentarily puzzled, but then suddenly I realized, “That’s the name of that book!”  I rushed to my computer to look it up and sure enough, The Crystal Tree was third in a series of books by Jennie Lindquist about a girl named Nancy who goes to live with her Swedish grandparents and has fun with her cousins.

The books seem to be out of print and only available for way too much money. But they’re still there at my childhood library (the one where I always ran up the stairs), though sadly packed away in storage. I think the next time I’m back in town, I’ll have to call them up from storage and give them a re-read!