I just read about your bookstore and the Book Stumper in today’s New York Times. Amazing! And I have a book: written perhaps in the 1970s or early 1980s, it concerned two kids, an old house, and a crystal or other glass ball on a pedestal in the yard of an old house, and the kids used transcendental meditation to perhaps travel into the ball, maybe solve a crime or something.
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You’re not by any chance remembering ‘A wrinkle in time”
There are 3 kids in A Wrinkle in Time. I remember loving The Diamond in the Window and now need to find it and reread it because I remember it this way that the original poster describes.
Nope, not A Wrinkle in Time. But thank you!!
And I love A Wrinkle in Time and reread it every several years still. 🙂
Are you thinking of The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton? It’s not exactly as you describe, but they did have a glass globe on their lawn and it’ not TM, but the characters’ uncle is a Transcendentalist philosopher a la Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau.
OMG that might be the one! I just read a few snippets that they have on Google Books and I think it’s familiar!! This is like magic! Thank you so much!! I’ve got to get that book! I think I read The Fledgling too, bc that looks vaguely familiar as well.
Yay! These were among my favorite books growing up in Massachusetts. Check out the Swing in the Summerhouse and The Astonishing Stereoscope, too!
There’s a second book by Jane Langton about the same children: The Swing in the Summerhouse. Both favorites.
I am going to find both of them! You all are amazing–thanks!
There is a whole series of Jane Langton books. Diamond in the Window, Swing in the Summerhouse, check Amazon for the others. She is still alive and still writing.
Thank you so much–the more I look, the more I’m convinced that this is the book. Terrific! 🙂