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#7 From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967)
183 points

A brother and sister run away to Metropolitan Museum of art in New York City. Is it plausible? Dude, you’re missing the point. For kids, this 1968 Newbery Medal winner is escapist fiction at its best. – Travis Jonker

I listened to this book on audiobook cassette every night for weeks in the fourth grade. I was too shy to run away to a museum, so I lived vicariously through Claudia and Jamie. Add in an art mystery? I was obsessed! This was also the first I learned the sad truth about movie adaptations. The made for TV movie came out a few years after I read the book and it failed miserably to meet my 13-year-old expectations. I cried so much after the movie aired and consoled myself in the book once again because the book was of course much better. – Sarah (Green Bean Teen Queen)

When I had the kids read this book as part of my library bookgroup I told them all about automats.  They were enthralled.  Now my library is opening an exhibit that will feature a real automat in the center of the exhibit space.   I’m oddly excited about this.

The synopsis from the book itself reads, “Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away . . . so she decided to run not from somewhere but to somewhere – somewhere large, warm, comfortable, and beautiful.  And that was how Claudia and her brother, Jamie, ended up living in the Metropolitan Museum of Art – and right in the middle of a mystery that made headlines.”

Origins.  According to Perry Nodelman in American Writers for Children Since 1960: Fiction, “Konigsburg has said the book originated at a family picnic in Yellowstone National Park, during which her children complained about everything they could think of: ‘I realized that if my children ever left home, they would never revert to barbarism. They would carry with them all the fussiness and tidiness of suburban life. Where could they go…? Maybe they could find some way to live with caution and compulsiveness and still satisfy their need for adventure’.”  I love that quote.  It sort of allows the entire book to make sense to me.

Anita Silvey in 100 Best Books for Children adds in some other pertinent details.  “In 1965 she read in the New York Times about the purchase of a statue by the Metropolitan Museum of Art – The Lady with the Primroses, possibly the work of Leonardo da Vinci.”  The characters of Claudia and Jamie were also based on her own kids.

In terms of the book, Nodelman quotes John Rowe Townsend who says, “The fact that Mrs. Frankweiler narrates the whole story, which she herself does not enter until near the end, seems to me to be a major flaw.”  Nodelman adds, “indeed, the biggest question about this novel is why Mrs. Frankweiler is in it at all. But it is Mrs. Frankweiler’s presence in the book that allows it to be more than lightweight.”

Pop Quiz, Hotshots: What do the E. and the L. in E.L. Konigsburg’s name stand for?  You have until the end of this post to answer correctly.  Tick… tick… tick…

When asked in an interview in the February 1986 edition of Language Arts how she crafts her stories, Ms. Konigsburg had this to say: “Somewhere in the course of writing the characters take over and oft

    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?

Claire, my third-grader niece, is in love with books. "Classics!" she says, when you ask her what she likes. "The Cricket in Times Square!" she declares, a recent favorite. Books that have survived, that have been loved, that are time tested and therefore true. She reads them to herself; she invites others to read to her; she recounts the tales in loving detail (then breaks into an all-out rendition of "The Twelve Days of Christmas").

Talking with Claire takes me back. To Heidi and Pippi Longstockings. To Harriet the Spy, The Secret Garden, Doctor Doolittle, and Black Beauty. It floods me with the desire to fill her library with more books to love—with classic classics or with books, newly written, that feel timeless. So far I've bought her the following for Christmas: River of Words, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Penderwicks, and From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. (Along with necklace, for she's as pretty as can be.)

I wonder what you might suggest.