Marianne Malone

Marianne Malone is an American author from Illinois, best known for The Sixty-Eight Rooms series, a middle-grade fantasy sequence in which two children discover a magic key that shrinks them to explore the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, traveling through history via the museum's tiny period rooms. The series continues through Stealing Magic, The Pirate's Coin, and The Secret of the Key. The first book, The Sixty-Eight Rooms, received an Honor Book citation from the E. B. White Read Aloud Award. Malone's work is distinguished by pairing genuine historical and art-historical detail -- drawn from an actual museum collection -- with time-travel fantasy adventure for middle-grade readers.