The Sixty-Eight Rooms

Locations
Call Number: Y BOCD Fiction / Malone, Marianne, Kids BOCD / Fiction / Action & Adventure / Sixty Eight Rooms Adventure 1
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown Kids 4-week checkout	Y BOCD Fiction / Malone, Marianne	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Kids A/V 4-week checkout	Kids BOCD / Fiction / Action & Adventure / Sixty Eight Rooms Adventure 1	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Unabridged.
Compact discs.
A better-than-average field trip -- What Jack found -- Ruthie braves it -- Mr. Bell -- A second attempt -- The plan -- Mrs. McVittie -- Jack's idea -- Sophie -- Attacked! -- A voice from the past -- The uses of duct tape -- A boy named Thomas -- A wish fulfilled -- A surprising discovery -- Detective work and ringing bells -- A dusty old shop -- Solved! -- Something left behind.
Read by Cassandra Campbell.
Ruthie thinks nothing exciting will ever happen to her until her sixth-grade class visits the Art Institute of Chicago, where she and her best friend Jack discover a magic key that shrinks them to the size of gerbils and allows them to explore the Thorne Rooms--the collection of sixty-eight miniature rooms from various time periods and places--and discover their secrets.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

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Excerpt

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

kind of tiresome submitted by camelsamba on August 31, 2015, 10:48pm Narrator for the BOCD was good, but I found this book kind of tiresome. The premise is interesting: two children find a magic key that allows them to shrink down small enough in order to visit the Thorne Rooms in the Art Institute of Chicago. But their escapades - not to mention all the shrinking and enlarging and traveling across carpet and under doors - gets kind of tiresome. And every now and then Ruthie gets this shivery feeling that leads her one step further into understanding the full implications of what they can do, but also feels plopped in to advance the plot. Then add in a time travel element where they totally violate time travel rules and it gets to be too much. (Although if the people outside the rooms aren't real, does it actually violate those rules? But then again, you get clues that they ARE real. Hmmmm.)

Middle grades readers might find it magical - or maybe kids just beyond The Magic Tree House series, because it felt a bit Jack-and-Annie-esque at times (notice how close the names are? Ruthie and Jack? I swear the narrator said "Jack and Annie" at least once! Or else my ears tricked me...). Teens would likely be bored. We were listening to the BOCD during a long car ride, and my children (12, 15, 17) kept falling asleep - although that could also be that they were tired, not just that the book didn't keep their attention!