Rainy Books | Mona's Eyes

Every year for Christmas, my husband finds me a unique or interesting book as part of my gift. This year, he chose Mona's Eyes. It's a book I've seen displayed at Barnes & Nobles as their book of the year for 2025. I always make the books he gets me on the top of the list of my TBR and what I found was a love letter. Here are my thoughts on Mona's Eyes by Thomas Schlesser.

 

About the Author

Thomas Schlesser is the director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation in Antibes, France. He teaches Art History at the École Polytechnique in Paris and is the author of several works of nonfiction about art, artists, and the relationship between art and politics in the 20th century. He is the grandson of André Schlesser, known as Dadé, a singer and cabaret performer who founded the Cabaret L ’Écluse. Mona’s Eyes is Schlesser’s second novel and his American debut. It has been translated into thirty-eight languages, including Braille. Schlesser was awarded 2025’s Author of the Year by Livres Hebdo. 

 

About the Book

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. 

Book Talk 

This book is a love letter, to maybe two entities, as I’ve been learning more about the author while writing this blog. It’s first and foremost, a passionate love letter to art. As a reader, I’ve never learned so much about art from any other book than I did reading Mona’s Eye’s. In each chapter, we get a short, but impactful art and history lesson through Mona’s eyes and also from her Dadé.

That gets me to who the second love letter is to. Mona loves her Dadé, and it’s clear that the feeling goes both ways. It is this bond that pushes Mona forward to learning her truth and to growing into a more, well-rounded person. With each lesson, Henry, her Dadé, pushes Mona to look at things further, understand the meaning behind not only the painting, but the person behind the painting. This is a kind of paralell to him trying to figure not only what Mona’s blindness was due to, but the person behind the blindness.

Now, as interesting as I found this book, it did start to feel repetitive after a while. Each chapter was set up pretty much the exact same format - we get a little bit of what’s happening with Mona, and then we go into the Wednesday art lesson with her Dadé. After some chapters, I found myself skipping a few of the chapters, though I was intrigued with the artists that I know and love. Just like Mona, I did my best to open my horizon to a book that you don’t read every day.

Overall, this is definitely a book I haven’t read before, but it’s not one that I recommend for everyone. If you are into historical, art, and looking at things from different perspectives, or you want to challenge yourself with a different type of book altogether, then this may be a book for you. I enjoyed the majority of this story and am happy to have read it at least once.

Until Next Time, Happy Reading!