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Award-winning children's author Elise Broach will visit Marshalltown in early December in conjunction with a series of field trips to the Marshalltown Arts and Civic Center (MACC) for 3rd and 4th graders. Broach will also offer a student writer's workshop at Lenihan and be featured at a public Meet & Green/book-signing event at the Marshalltown Library on Thursday, Dec. 7.
Broach was selected to visit as part of a collaborative project between the library and the MACC. One of Broach's most well-known books, Masterpiece, is a middle grade mystery about an artistic beetle named Marvin. Marvin and his friend James (a human boy) get caught up in an art heist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and work together to help recover a famous drawing by artist Albrecht Dürer. Nancy Vellinga, director of the MACC, hoped the novel's plotline would generate interest among local students about the real theft of a Monet, which was stolen from Marshalltown's own Fisher Art Museum (housed in the MACC, then Fisher Community Center) in the late 1980s. In a strange turn of events, the stolen painting was later recovered the following year at the LeGrand Post Office.
Youth services librarian, Joa LaVille, recommended Broach as an author with wide appeal, due to books for young people at a variety of reading levels. According to LaVille, Masterpiece reads like a combination of the Newbery-winning classics Cricket in Times Square and From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Broach has also written shorter beginning chapter books featuring the characters of James and Marvin of Masterpiece. Broach's newest novel, Duet, features a mystery about a long-lost Chopin piano. In addition to other middle grade mysteries, Broach has also written a few funny picture books, including When Dinosaurs Came with Everything and Wet Dog.
The library's "meet & greet" event will be held on Thursday, Dec. 7 in the large meeting room at the Marshalltown Public Library and will start with a short author talk/reading, followed by time for book-singing and/or individual interactions from 5:00 until 5:30 pm. Beaverdale Books will be in the library's lobby starting at 3:30, with a variety of Elise Broach books for sale, for those interested in having them signed by the author.
This multi-day event with Elise Broach is made possible by a partnership between the MACC and the Marshalltown Public Library, and funds from the Community Foundation of Marshall County and the Friends of the Marshalltown Public Library. For more information about the author, visit her website at https://www.elisebroach.com/.