Konigsburg has always gone her own way in her fiction for young people, occasionally using sophisticated literary techniques like multiple-voice narration that some adults might find inappropriate. She has also turned literary conventions upside down in some of her work. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967) won the 1968 Newbery Medal despite her refusal to employ formulaic story ideas and plot devices. Konigsburg presents in this book the novel concept of children who run away from home not into the woods but into that fascinating seat of learning, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Laurie Konigsburg Todd says that this unique plot element of children fleeing for freedom to a civilized place rather than an uncivilized one was inspired by what her mother overheard at a long-ago picnic. Konigsburg listened to her children complain about "insects and heat" on this family occasion, and she realized...