The Sixty-Eight Rooms / Marianne Malone / 274 pages / First Book in a Series

This is a creative time travel tale set in and around the Chicago Art Institute's Thorne Rooms.  The Thorne Rooms are a collection of sixty-eight exquisite, almost eerily realistic, miniature rooms.  Each of the rooms is designed in the style of a different time and place, and each detail is perfect, from the knobs on the doors to the candles in the candlesticks.  Some might even say the rooms are magical.  Chicago sixth graders Ruthie and Jack certainly experience the magic as they save Sophie from the French Revolution, are involved in the Salem Witch Trials, and are able to recover something lost.