Mona's Eyes
The New York Times Bestseller
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £7.99
Publisher Description
THE 1 MILLION COPY BESTSELLER
"Shockingly good."—The Daily Mail
Ten-year-old Mona is about to lose her sight forever. Her beloved grandfather has only fifty-two Wednesdays to visit fifty-two works of art and commit to memory "all that is beautiful in the world" before this happens.
While the doctors can find no explanation for Mona's brief episode of blindness, they agree that the threat of permanent vision loss cannot be ruled out. The girl's grandfather, Henry, may not be able to stop his granddaughter from losing her sight, but he can fill the encroaching darkness with beauty. For every Wednesday during a year, the pair will visit a single masterpiece in one of Paris's renowned museums. From Botticelli to Basquiat, Mona learns how each artist's work shaped the world around them. In turn, the young girl's world is changed forever by the power of their art.
Under the kind and careful tutelage of her grandfather, Mona learns the true meaning of generosity, melancholy, love, loss, and revolution. Her perspective will never be the same—nor will the reader's.
READER REVIEWS
"This is a novel that will touch many."
"Hypnotic."
"This beautiful, well-researched book is captivating."
"A pleasure read!"
"I loved every page."
"Heartwarming and refreshing."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Art historian Schlesser's vibrant English-language debut frames a survey of classical Western art with the story of a Parisian man supporting his 10-year-old granddaughter after her sudden bout of temporary blindness. Mona's doctor, unable to explain the cause or predict whether it will recur, refers her to a psychiatrist. Instead, her grandfather surreptitiously takes her to one of the city's museums each week for a year, under the ruse that he's delivering her to the psych appointments and out of the hope that should Mona's blindness return permanently, the artwork she sees will enrich her visual memory. Each week, they look closely at a single work, including such legendary paintings as the Mona Lisa, which Mona considers sad because of its dark and empty background, and less-famous pieces like Rosa Bonheur's Plowing in the Nivernais, which Schlesser evocatively describes ("The work, of panoramic scope, depicted furrows cut by plowshares across its entire width. The sky, with its blended shades of blue fading perfectly to convey the subtle light of a chill morning, took up half of the canvas"). Schlesser seamlessly interweaves the art lessons with Mona's story, which concludes with an explanation for the cause of her blindness. Readers of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World will love this.
