Juvenile Literature |
Mystery |
Juvenile Fiction |
Summary
Summary
Almost everybody who has grown up in Chicago knows about the Thorne Rooms. Housed in the Children's Galleries of the Chicago Art Institute, they are a collection of 68 exquisitely crafted miniature rooms made in the 1930s by Mrs. James Ward Thorne. Each of the 68 rooms is designed in the style of a different historic period, and every detail is perfect, from the knobs on the doors to the candles in the candlesticks. Some might even say, the rooms are magic.
Imagine--what if you discovered a key that allowed you to shrink so that you were small enough to sneak inside and explore the rooms' secrets? What if you discovered that others had done so before you? And that someone had left something important behind?
Fans of Chasing Vermeer, The Doll People , and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler will be swept up in the magic of this exciting art adventure!
Author Notes
Marianne Malone is the cofounder of the Campus School Middle School for Girls in Urbana, Illinois. She and her husband divide their time between Urbana and Washington, D.C. For Teacher's Guides (including common core tie-ins) and more, visit MarianneMalone.com.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Debut author Malone pens a fantasy tale of museum time travel that suffers from an underdeveloped cast of characters and some disappointing plotting decisions. When daring 11-year-old Jack finds a key in the hallway behind the Thorne Rooms, 68 miniature historical dioramas housed in the Art Institute of Chicago, he hands it to his best friend, Ruthie, a cautious girl who yearns for excitement. To their shock, she shrinks to five inches tall. After figuring out how to shrink Jack down, the duo hide in the hallway past closing time, try on fancy clothes and armor, battle a cockroach, and are thrilled to find that doors lead out from the rooms into the actual past. Cop-outs abound, there are no villains to speak of, and the sixth-graders generally seem too good to be true ("You mean you've never been to the Thorne Rooms?" Jack asks Ruthie early on. "I thought everyone had!"). Readers will find little excitement in either the time travelogue or the clinical descriptions of the genuinely delightful Thorne Rooms, which deserve better. Ages 8-12. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
During a field trip, Jack and Ruthie find a key at the Art Institute of Chicago that lets them shrink and enter the worlds of the miniature Thorne Rooms. Accessible prose and shadowy illustrations depict the best friends sneaking in and out of history, affecting lives both past and present. Thin plot or not, this original adventure is alluring, filled with magic and mystery. Copyright 2010 of The Horn Book, Inc. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Sixth-graders Ruthie and her best friend, Jack, are on a class visit to Chicago's Art Institute, where they see the famous Thorne Rooms. Filled with incredible miniatures, the rooms, representing different time periods, fascinate Ruthie. When she finds a key that shrinks her and allows her to get inside the rooms, Ruthie wants to return as soon as possible. Jack is a willing partner, and when a way is found to shrink him, too, the adventure really begins. First-time novelist Malone carefully crafts a fantastical story with plenty of real-world elements, including Jack's mother's worries as she tries to make a living as an artist and the subplot of a museum security guard, who has lost something important. Jack and Ruthie find it in the rooms, which tie the past and present together. There are contrivances that make accessibility to the adventures possible, but readers will focus on the mystery, the history, and the excitement of being small.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Barely a chapter into this novel, readers may feel as if they're deep inside the black hold of an oil tanker - in a good way. The author painstakingly evokes a dystopian future where rising waters have submerged the Gulf Coast and salvaging scrap from ships is one of the few honest jobs left. Nailer, small for his age, is "good scavenge," but he stares at the mile-high clipper ships of the wealthy "slicing across the ocean" in the distance. He dreams of being on one: the ambition to bring down the system they represent comes later, amid an epic storm and a screen-ready chase scene. SHARK VS. TRAIN By Chris Barton. Illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld. Little, Brown. $16.99. (Ages 3 to 6) Who will win the face-off between two favorite toys: the shark or the train? (A dinosaur must be waiting in the wings.) Lichtenheld's high-energy drawings are the main appeal in a series of contests that could have built to more drama. (The opponents bowl, trick or treat and . . . make lemonade?) At the end, two boys drop the game and break for lunch: "Next time, you're history!" as the shark says, face-first in the toy box. STUCK ON EARTH By David Klass. Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $16.99. (Ages 11 to 14) "We are skimming over the New Jersey countryside in full search mode, hunting a 14-year-old." Ketchvar III, who resembles a common snail, is here from another planet to inhabit the mind and body of "an infinitely lower life-form," an American teenager. The mission: to judge whether the human race is worth saving. A witty and penetrating satire of American life follows, as Ketchvar, having taken over Tom Filber, burrows into a typical unhappy suburban family and high school. It's easy to sympathize with both of them. THE DREAMER By Pam Muñoz Ryan. Illustrated by Peter Sis. Scholastic. $17.99. (Ages 9 to 14) Ryan's hypnotic text, inspired by the childhood of Pablo Neruda, is brought to life by the extraordinary art of Peter Sis. Image after image - a locomotive in woods, an angry father in pointillist silhouette -give shape to the imagination of a lonely boy, Neftalí. Ryan captures the way in which the world is a dream to him; even the numbers in his math homework "hold hands in a long procession of tiny figures" before they fly through the window and escape, just as he one day will. THE SIXTY-EIGHT ROOMS By Marianne Malone. Illustrated by Greg Call. Random House. $16.99. (Ages 8 to 12) Malone's first novel is a smoothly written fantasy with an appealing premise. Ruthie and Jack, best friends on a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago's Thorne Rooms - 68 perfectly realistic miniature chambers - find a magic key to get inside them. Not only can Ruthie lie in an elegant canopied bed, she can also step into the painted landscape visible through the window ("Being outside in 18th-century France felt surprisingly normal"). There are few great surprises along the way, but the fantasy of a parallel world is irresistible nonetheless. POETREES Written and illustrated by Douglas Florian. Beach Lane. $16.99. (Ages 6 and up) Florian's richly watercolored collages, accompanied by verse, evoke a whole forest of trees. Sometimes it takes just a handful of words. "From the acorn grows the tree - slowly, slowly," he writes, as an oak fills a two-page spread, stained onto paper. JULIE JUST BEST FRIENDS A podcast with Jon J Muth and Mo Willems on creating "City Dog, Country Frog," at nytimes.com/books.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-6-Take a key from Alice in Wonderland, add a night at the museum from The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and lace it with time travel. That's the adventure waiting sixth grader Ruthie and her friend Jack when they visit the Art Institute of Chicago on a field trip in Marianne Malone's tale (Random, 2010). Inside the institute sits the Thorne Rooms, 68 legendary miniature rooms each reflecting a different historical period. The magnificence of the rooms captures Ruthie's imagination. In her own simple life, she can only dream about such opulence. When Jack manages to get a backroom peek at the exhibit, he convinces Ruthie to go with him. That's when Jack discovers a magical key tucked into a corner of the floor. When Ruthie touches the key, she shrinks, allowing her to explore the Thorne Rooms. Ruthie and Jack discover that the rooms are much more than historical recreations-they are portals to the trials and tribulations of earlier times. The friends must conquer the challenges confronting them in the different eras or be lost in time. Their wondrous adventure, filled with twists and turns and blending fantasy with history and modern day problems, is sure to intrigue listeners. Cassandra Campbell's narration is spot-on, and her pacing will hold listeners' attention throughout.-Robyn Gioia, Bolles School, Ponte Vedra, FL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Who hasn't seen the carefully composed exhibits of miniatures at a museum, or even a simple dollhouse, and wondered what it would be like to be small enough to walk inside? First-time author Malone clearly has. Her tale revolves around the magical adventures of two everyday kids, Ruthie and Jack, among the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. Sixth graders at a prestigious private school, they're best friends and complete opposites. When Jack finds a mysterious key on a class outing, a key that enables Ruthie and anything she touches to shrink, the magic begins. Along the way Jack and Ruthie make friends with some children from the past and discover that others have used the key before them. The author works hard providing background details for adult and child characters alike, but she can't quite manage to breathe life into any of them. As a result, her story seems overlong and contains entirely too many convenient coincidences. That said, her effort may find an enthusiastic audience, for the premise is engaging and the plotting easy to follow. Predictable but pleasant. (Magical adventure. 8-12) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Getting up in the morning was always a challenge for Ruthie. It wasn't waking up that was difficult--it was getting out of bed. She had to scrunch down to the end of her bed and climb out through the narrow opening between her desk and her sister's dresser. Then she had to be careful where she placed her feet on the floor because the under-the-bed storage bin for her summer clothes didn't quite fit under her twin bed. It stuck out just enough to trip her or stub a toe. The other difficult part was to avoid waking up her sister so Ruthie could claim the bathroom first. Claire was older and seemed to need much more time in the bathroom before school--or before going anywhere--than Ruthie did. Ruthie didn't understand why that was but it was an observation she had made many, many times. Claire was nice enough--not horrible like some siblings Ruthie had heard of. But she took up so much time and space. Mostly space. In their little room, Claire's stuff dominated by far. She had a computer and a big printer on her already larger desk, all her sports equipment, lots of clothes piled everywhere and a growing mountain of college brochures, SAT study guides and application information. Claire was a junior in high school and starting the process of applying to college. Ruthie counted the days till her sister went away to school. Then she would have her own room. This morning Ruthie woke up first and made her way through the small path in their bedroom to the doorway without waking Claire. She looked down the hall--great luck! The bathroom was empty and all hers. Among the kids at her school she was the only one whose family shared one bathroom. Ruthie turned on the shower first to let the water warm up, took her one bottle of shampoo off the wire rack and tried to find a space for it on the shower ledge next to Claire's and their mom's gazillion hair care products. It wasn't easy. As the warm water ran over her back she stood there for a moment, mulling the fact that the shower was just about the only place in her apartment where she could be alone and think privately. She envisioned the day ahead of her, the field trip and what the chances were of something cool happening today. Why not today? After a really exciting or unusual thing happens, do people look back and say, "I thought something would happen today"? Probably not. But why not? Ruthie wondered. Don't people ever have a feeling,a sign that something great will happen? Her time alone was interrupted when the door to the bathroom opened, not once but three times. From behind the map-of-the-world shower curtain she heard her dad say, "Sorry, Ruthie, I'm just looking for a book I thought I left in here last night." "Dad, please!" Ruthie said. "Don't worry, I can't see anything! Now, where did I put it?" He closed the door. Sheesh! A minute later it was her mom. "Ruthie, have you seen your father's book on American history?" "Mom, do you mind? No, I haven't. He already asked me." "Well, don't take too long in the shower. Your sister needs to get going." Right on cue, Claire came in and started brushing her teeth. "Claire, can't I have any privacy?" "Oh, Ruthie. Don't be a prude. Hurry up, okay?" Six hundred and thirty-five days till she goes to college, Ruthie groaned to herself. An eternity! From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from The Sixty-Eight Rooms by Marianne Malone All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.