Mona's Eyes
A Novel
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3.8 • 125 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
New York Times Bestseller • Barnes & Noble 2025 Book of the Year • Boston Globe Best Book of the Year • National Indie Bestseller • Top Ten Indie Next Pick • Indigo Heather’s Pick
Ten-year-old Mona and her beloved grandfather have only fifty-two Wednesdays to visit fifty-two works of art and commit to memory “all that is beautiful in the world” before Mona loses her sight forever.
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. Every Wednesday for a year, the pair abscond together and 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.
Mona’s Eyes is a heartfelt, enlightening journey across five centuries of Western art history. With the emotional impact of The Elegance of the Hedgehog and the readability of The Little Paris Bookshop, Thomas Schlesser’s sensational debut novel is at once a moving book about the beauty of life and a deeply touching story about the special bond between a girl and her grandfather.
“Vibrant debut ... Schlesser seamlessly interweaves the art lessons with Mona’s story... Readers of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie's World will love this.”—Publishers Weekly
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.
Customer Reviews
Kind of Weird
I felt like there was a nice little story in this book but it was surrounded by an art history text book.