What We're Reading: Tracy

The Sixty-Eight Rooms, by Marianne Malone.

Have you ever wished you could become small enough to play inside a dollhouse? This common childhood fantasy comes true in The Sixty-Eight Rooms. In this gently told story, two children on a museum field trip discover a magical key that allows them to shrink until they're dollhouse sized. The field trip is to the Art Institute of Chicago, the real-life home of the famous Thorne Rooms, a collection of sixty-eight elaborate miniature settings designed in the 1930s by Mrs. James Ward Thorne of Chicago. The rooms took eight years to complete, and offer views of European and American homes from the 1400s to the 1930s. Their craftsmanship is so fine and their detail so exquisite that a photograph of a Thorne room is virtually indistinguishable from its real-life counterpart. You can see the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute's website.