Book review: The Sixty-Eight Rooms by Marianne Malone (Juvenile)

If you've ever visited the Art Institute of Chicago, you've probably seen the Thorne Rooms. Conceived of and owned by Narcissa Niblack Thorne, these rooms display the interiors of American and European houses ranging from the late 13th century to the 1930s. Each aspect is constructed at a scale of one inch to one foot, so the models are incredibly detailed. Many of the rooms are exact replicas of existing architecture and interior design of their periods and countries.

Thorne married one of the heirs to the Montgomery Ward fortune and lived in Chicago. She loved dollhouse miniatures, and she created almost 100 roomboxes. Thorne commissioned master craftsmen and visual artists to build the rooms between 1932 and 1940, and she also searched for period objects and miniatures in antique shops and flea markets. She never profited from the collection. She hoped that miniature models could substitute for costly full-scale period rooms that museums were acquiring at the time.

Currently, 68 Thorne Rooms are housed at the Art Institute of Chicago, with another 20 at the Phoenix Art Museum, nine at the Knoxville Museum of Art, one at the Indianapolis Children's Museum, one at the Kaye Miniature Museum in Los Angeles, and one at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In The Sixty-Eight Rooms, Ruthie and Jack are on a field trip at the Art Institute. Jack finds a key that magically allows them to shrink down to less than six inches tall--the perfect size to explore the Thorne Rooms! They discover that they are not the first ones to find the key or search through the rooms. In fact, they find objects left behind by others. While in the rooms, the world outside the windows comes alive. Ruthie and Jack sneak into the museum, and together they see history unfold firsthand as they unlock the secrets of the Thorne Rooms.

I loved this book. When I was a kid, I always wished I could spend the night in a department store or a museum. I also wanted to experience magic. Ruthie and Jack have such contagious curiosity and excitement about not just the Thorne Rooms but about the historical periods depicted in the rooms (like the French Revolution, the Salem Witch Trials, Colonial America, Medieval Europe). While I read, I looked at the actual rooms and could easily picture myself there.

For more information on the Thorne Rooms, check out:

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/thorne
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/category/15


If you like The Sixty-Eight Rooms, you might also like:
From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
The Dollhouse Murders by Betty Ren Wright
The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden
The Borrowers by Mary Norton
Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett
The Calder Game by Blue Balliett
Masterpiece by Elise Broach
The Mystery of the Mona Lisa by Elizabeth Singer Hunt
The Time Warp Trio series by Jon Scieszka
The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks
The Castle in the Attic by Elizabeth Winthrop
The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh by Robert C. O'Brien
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
The Evolution of Calpernia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly
The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick
The Minstrel's Melody by Eleanora Tate
Arthur and the Minimoys by Luc Besson


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