The Sixty-Eight Rooms [Paperback]

The perfect next step for kids who love the Magic Tree House series,time travel, mystery, and adventure!

Almost everybody who has grown up in Chicago knows about the Thorne Rooms. Housed in the deep inside the Chicago Art Institute, they are a collection of 68 exquisitely crafted miniature rooms. Each room is set in a different historic period, and every detail is perfect. Some might even say, the rooms aremagic.

But what if on a field trip, you discovered a key that allowed you to shrink so that you could 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?

Eleven-year-olds Jack and Ruthie are about to find out!


  Irresistible. —The New York Times

Marianne Malone has tapped into a fantasy that is . . . completely universal. —Chicago Tribune

A solid story. Recommend this book to fans of Blue Balliett’sChasing Vermeer. —School Library JournalMARIANNE MALONE is the mother of three grown children, a former art teacher, and the cofounder of the Campus School Middle School for Girls in Urbana, Illinois. She and her husband divide their time between Urbana and Washington, DC. This is her first novel. You can visit her Web site at MarianneMalone.com.Getting up in the morningwas 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 balăs