The Tintiweb is magic

It's my niece's 7th birthday next week and she had her birthday parties this weekend (yes, plural). I asked my sister what my niece would want for her birthday, since she gets so many presents and already has so many toys and art supplies (she loves drawing).

My sister asked me to get her some chapter books that are a little more grown up but still have drawings and short chapters that they can read a chapter at a time before bedtime.

Have I said this before? I LOVE BOOKS.

I especially loved books when I was a kid.The library was only a 5 minute walk down the street and I would go there on a regular basis with a big cloth bag and come home lumbered with books. I remember one summer we went to Hong Kong and my carry on for the 12 hour flight was a dozen paperbacks, most of them Baby Sitters Club books. I used to spend my recesses in Grade 4. That probably was taking it too far. I probably should have been getting some fresh air or something. But I didn't. I just wanted to read my books.



So I tried to think of all my favourite books around that age. I ended up getting her the the first out of the Ramona Quimby series, as well as the first of The Mouse and the Motorcycle series. Both are by Beverly Cleary, which I'd completely forgotten! I also wanted to get The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden, but that wasn't stocked by Chapters. The whole section reminded me how old I was, given it was stocked with these fairy ballerina series and a whole shelf of stuff by some guy named Stilton. What is all that stuff?

But what it got me thinking about was one of the books I'd gotten at the school Scholastic bookfairs when I was 10 or so (not quite appropriate for my niece and nephew yet but it goes on the list for future) but all I could remember was the following:

1) it had a brown cover
2) it was about time travel by two kids
3) the time travel had something to do with an old house

That didn't leave a lot to go on, but this afternoon I suddenly remembered:

4) someone was stuck in a birdcage elevator

so I googled "time travel birdcage elevator novel" and the miracle of the internet is that someone had asked a similar question on a forum in goodreads!!! By that random far-fetched search I was able to determine that this book I was after is called Voices After Midnight by Richard Peck!

What did people do back in the day when you couldn't google random crap like this? did they just go crazy wondering and never find out?