Hurry Up, Houdini!

Hurry Up, Houdini by Mary Pope Osborne is a time travel adventure for 7 year olds with a very tight deadline attached to it.

What happens

Mum gives Jack and Annie twenty minutes before the hot dogs go on the grill. Jack checks his watch. It is 5.42, so they are due home by two minutes past six.

In that twenty minutes they have to reach Coney Island in 1908 and find Harry Houdini.

It is their second errand for Merlin. He wants four secrets of greatness, and they came back from the first one with HUMILITY written on a scrap of paper.

Things go wrong almost straight away. Annie wants a hot dog first. Then ice cream. Then a boat ride down an enormous water slide. Jack only wants to buy the tickets.

By the time they get to the box office the show has been sold out for an hour.

The bickering is the best bit. Jack is the one with the pocket watch and the worried face. Annie is the one saying one little ride won't hurt us.

They are both right and both a bit annoying, which is very much how it goes with a brother and a sister on a day out.

Coney Island itself is a treat to read about. Every single stall is shouting that it is the greatest. Greatest hot dog, greatest pink lemonade, greatest roller coaster in the country.

Jack works out that if everything is the greatest then nothing really is. A lady on a bench overhears him and tells her husband the boy is a genius.

Keep an eye on that lady and her husband. They are wearing enormous hats and they are far more interesting than Jack notices.

A note on the money. It is an American book, so your reader gets pennies, nickels and dimes rather than pounds, and a hot dog costs three cents. Nothing difficult, but you might get asked.

If you've got a child who likes a clock ticking away in the background, this one keeps moving. There is a famous name waiting at the end of it and no obvious way in.

What to read next

Jack and Annie have done a lot of these trips, so you can start almost anywhere. If you'd rather take them in order, the mission just before this one is Stallion by Starlight. That's where Merlin turns up in Frog Creek himself, hands over the Ring of Truth and the bottle of magic mist, and sends them off to ancient Macedonia.