About seven years ago, I went on one of the best field trips I've ever chaperoned as a teacher. At the time, I was teaching sixth grade, and the sixth grade team took the whole grade (about 75 kids) to Chicago for three days. It was an amazing experience, and not just because that particular class was particularly awesome. We visited wonderful sites, really cool neighborhoods, and one of the best museums in the country, The Art Institute of Chicago. I had been there a few times before, and I created a scavenger hunt type of activity for the kids to do, where they perused the museum, looking for giant Warhols and Monet landscapes and stained glass by Chagall. But there was one place where they all gathered and nobody wanted to leave: the Thorne Rooms, sixty-eight perfectly scaled and furnished models of rooms from across the ages and across the world. If you have never seen the Thorne Rooms, they are almost impossible to describe accurately and completely. They are meticulously recreated rooms, precisely detailed down to the wallpaper and the drawer pulls. Visit them at the AIC website for a taste. The students were fascinated by these little rooms! Their jaws dropped, their eyes widened, and they thrilled in every detail. It was pretty magical.
So I was very excited when I saw Marianne Malone's The Sixty-Eight Rooms on the shelf at the bookstore. Malone is, according to the jacket flap, an artist and former art teacher, and in her author's note at the end of the book, she writes that she visited the Thorne Rooms often as a child. She must have harbored dreams about the rooms for many years before whipping up this charming little adventure.
According to sixth grader Ruthie Stewart, life is dull, dull, dull. She has no privacy in her family's cramped Chicago apartment, no interesting background like her classmates at the Oakton School, and no excitement or adventure in her life. That's why she's thankful for her best friend Jack, a boy with a vivacious personality and little fear of anything.
But things do liven up for Ruthie when she enters Gallery 11 at The Art Institute of Chicago and, for the first time, views the Thorne Rooms. Ruthie is awed and amazed by the glass box displays she sees, each one a perfectly recreated tableau of a room from sometime in American or European history. When Ruthie wonders aloud how the rooms have been installed, Jack runs off to find out. On the bus ride back to school, Jack shows Ruthie a key that he found in the dim corridor behind the room displays. Jack thinks it will make an excellent addition to his key collection, but Ruthie wants to go back to the museum to find out more about the key's origin.
All the adventure that Ruthie wanted awaits her in Gallery 11. The key, in Ruthie's hands, shrinks her and Jack down to the perfect size to explore the Thorne Rooms. And while inside the miniature rooms, they find that they have traveled to each room's time period! In just one night, they must unravel the mysteries that they face: How does the key work and why does it only work when Ruthie holds it?
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