If you’ve ever feared forgetting the beauty you love, Mona’s Eyes feels like someone quietly taking your hand and saying, “Let’s start looking, properly, now.”
Schlesser builds his entire novel on a terrifying diagnosis: a ten-year-old girl may soon go blind, and has just fifty-two weeks to stock her mind with masterpieces.
That ticking clock turns weekly museum visits into emergency lessons in seeing, feeling, and holding on to the world.
As a reader, you feel you’re being smuggled into those lessons alongside her, learning to see before the lights go out.
In plain English, Mona’s Eyes is a novel-length argument that art is not a luxury but a survival skill, especially when life feels unbearably fragile.
It insists that learning to look carefully—at paintings, at people, at our own pain—can be as urgent and transformative as any medicine.
What makes that claim convincing is the way Schlesser braids Mona’s story with real art-historical insight and the very real, measurable impact that encounters with art have in the world outside his fiction.
On the page, her grandfather Henry turns each painting into a miniature case study in resilience, politics, love, or grief, talking her through Botticelli, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Goya, Marina Abramović and many others with a mix of tenderness and rigor.
Outside the novel, the numbers are striking: in France alone, Les yeux de Mona has sold more than 500,000 copies in under two years, with translations in roughly 39 languages and film adaptation rights already sold.
At one point it topped French weekly sales charts with about 17,770 copies sold in a single week, ahead of established bestsellers.
In the US and beyond, it has been crowned Barnes & Noble’s 2025 Book of the Year, a rare distinction for a translated debut, and is promoted by its French publisher as a novel “que le monde entier s’arrache.”
Meanwhile, contemporary research keeps finding that exposure to original artworks and arts education genuinely changes lives: a recent King’s College London study showed that viewing masterpieces in a gallery reduced stress-related cortisol levels by about 22% and lowered key inflammatory markers, while similar benefits were not seen in control groups viewing reproductions.
Other large-scale reviews and pilots—from government-backed studies valuing cultural participation at billions of pounds in health and productivity gains, to Swiss and Canadian trials where doctors literally prescribe museum visits—suggest that the “art as therapy” premise at the heart of Mona’s Eyes is not wishful thinking but emerging public-health practice.
Mona’s Eyes is best for curious adult or teen readers who love museums or have always wanted an accessible, story-driven crash course in Western art history, and for anyone mentoring a young person through illness, grief, or anxiety.
If you’ve ever lingered too long in a gallery label or wept in front of an unexpected painting, you’re exactly its target reader.
But if you’re allergic to didactic narration, prefer your novels lean and plot-driven, or bristle at anything that smells remotely like a lesson, Mona’s Eyes may well feel more like being lectured than accompanied.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Mona’s Eyes (Les yeux de Mona in the original French) is the debut novel by art historian Thomas Schlesser, translated into English by Hildegarde Serle and published in English by Europa Editions in 2025 after its initial 2024 release at Albin Michel in France.
The premise is beautifully simple and unbearably sad: ten-year-old Mona has just been told there is a serious risk she will go blind within a year, and no one can say for sure whether it will happen.
Her grandfather Henry Vuillemin, an octogenarian art historian with a scarred face and a scarred past, decides that every Wednesday for fifty-two weeks he will take her to see exactly one masterpiece in Paris—mostly at the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Centre Pompidou—so she can carry a mental museum inside her if the worst arrives.
Those Wednesdays become the structural spine of Mona’s Eyes each chapter orbiting a specific work of art and the life lesson Henry extracts from it for his granddaughter.
Schlesser is not inventing this from nowhere: as an art historian and director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation, he has spent years thinking about how to make art history vivid and humane for non-specialists, and the novel is openly conceived as an “initiation” to art and to life.
That dual ambition—story and seminar—explains both the book’s enormous popular success and the impatience some critics feel with its tone.
In a way, Mona’s Eyes belongs to a lineage of philosophical fictions like Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World or even Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, but filtered through the specific history of European painting and the very modern anxiety of impending disability.
It arrives, too, at a moment when museum-based interventions are being embraced by doctors and policymakers as serious tools for mental health and social care, which makes its emotional and educational stakes feel uncannily timely.
2. Background and cultural context
Inside the story, what first struck me was how carefully Schlesser roots Henry and Mona in a very specific Paris—a grandfather who lives above the Bistrot du Peintre on Avenue Ledru-Rollin, shuffling along Boulevard Richard-Lenoir and Voltaire, his days punctuated by coffee, newspapers, and shelves of art books stacked to the ceiling.
Mona, meanwhile, is a bright, anxious child carrying more silence than a ten-year-old should: the early pages gesture at an absent grandmother, Colette, whose death is so painful that both Henry and Mona’s father refuse to speak her name, leaving Mona to prod at that taboo like a sore tooth.
Even before the diagnosis, the novel is already about stored-up grief and unspoken promises, beautifully encapsulated in the tiny seashell amulets grandfather and granddaughter both wear, reminders of vows once made “in the scorching heat” of 1963 and never fully explained to the child.
Henry’s habit of swearing on “what’s beautiful on earth” becomes, for Mona and for us, both a running joke and a kind of ethical program: beauty is not decoration, it’s the thing you stake your word on.
Formally, Mona’s Eyes is divided into three large sections that mirror Mona’s journey: the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and Beaubourg (Centre Pompidou), moving roughly from Renaissance and Baroque painting through nineteenth-century modernity to contemporary installations and performance.
Each space not only introduces a different style of art but also a subtly different emotional climate, from the crowded, sometimes stifling halls of the Louvre to the airy but unsettling rooms of contemporary art that Mona must learn to “feel” even with her eyes closed.
Because you asked not to have a full plot summary yet, I’ll leave the later twists unspoiled here and move straight into how the novel actually works on the level of character and theme.
3. Mona’s Eyes Summary
Part 1 : The year of Wednesdays begins
The novel opens with a shock. Ten-year-old Mona is doing her math homework in the family kitchen when everything suddenly turns black. One moment she sees the page, the table, her mother preparing dinner; the next, an internal “curtain” drops over her vision and she can see nothing at all.
Terrified, she cries out to her mother, who rushes her to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris. Mona’s father Paul drives, furious and frightened, insisting that “people don’t go blind just like that,” even as his daughter sobs in the back seat.
By the time they reach the hospital, Mona’s sight has returned as abruptly as it vanished. She watches a pigeon take off in the square, flooded with relief. Doctors run every possible test: eye examinations, MRIs, neurological work-ups. Everything comes back normal.
The pediatric ophthalmologist, Dr. Van Orst, tentatively calls it a transient ischemic attack—an episode of interrupted blood flow to the brain—but he’s unsettled by how long it lasted and by the lack of any physical cause. In the end, he can’t say whether the crisis will recur or whether Mona might one day lose her sight for good.
Mona returns home to Montreuil with no diagnosis and one huge, unspoken fear. Her parents, Camille and Paul, are both loving and chaotic in different ways. Camille is a worn-out temp-agency employee and serial volunteer, oscillating between fierce energy and collapse.
Paul is a vintage-goods dealer whose shop is slowly dying under the pressure of online sales; he drinks too much and hides empty bottles on a bottle-drying rack like small trophies.
While Mona undergoes follow-up tests, Van Orst suggests a child psychiatrist for “prevention rather than therapy,” to help her process the trauma.
Her parents, terrified of voicing their biggest question, never explicitly ask whether Mona might go blind. Instead they cling to the fact that nothing “organic” has been found.
Only Mona’s grandfather Henry—“Dadé”—dares to say it out loud when he calls: is his granddaughter going to lose her sight, yes or no?
Henry is crucial. An elderly, very tall man with a scarred face and heavy glasses, he lives alone near the Bastille, above the Bistrot du Peintre.
His everyday routine is a slow walk through eastern Paris, reading newspapers, then returning to an apartment packed with art books.
Once a photojournalist, he lost an eye when a militiaman slashed his face with a knife at the entrance to the Shatila camp in 1982; he was on his way to document the massacre of Palestinian civilians. The physical wound and the loss of his eye have made him both haunted and deeply protective of sight—as experience, as responsibility, as gift.
When Camille asks him to accompany Mona to the child psychiatrist, Henry has a different idea. As he looks around his granddaughter’s room—kitsch wallpaper, plastic toys, posters of teen idols—he is struck by how ugly most of the objects surrounding her are. Only two things count as true beauty to him: a vintage industrial lamp Paul found, and a poster of a Seurat nude from the Musée d’Orsay.
He realizes that if Mona does go blind, these cheap, flashy images will be the main visual memories stored in her mind. The thought horrifies him.
So he devises his own “therapy.” Instead of a psychiatrist, he will take Mona, every Wednesday after school, to the great museums of Paris.
One work per week, chosen with care: first the Louvre, then the Musée d’Orsay, then the Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg). They will stand in silence and look for several minutes, letting color and form soak in, and only then will Henry talk—about the painter, the story, and, above all, what the work says about how to live.
Over fifty-two weeks, they will build a mental “reservoir” of beauty she can draw on, if the darkness ever returns permanently.
This becomes the spine of the book: fifty-two chapters, each attached to a specific artwork and a life lesson, from Botticelli’s Venus and the Three Graces (“learn to receive”) to Soulages’s black canvases (“black is a color”).
Around that spine, we follow Mona’s school life, her parents’ crumbling marriage, and Henry’s buried grief over his late wife, Colette.
The first museum visit is to Botticelli’s fresco of Venus and the Three Graces. Mona dutifully stares for six long minutes at the cracked, faded surface, fighting boredom. Henry then explains that the three Graces symbolize giving, receiving, and giving back; the young woman on the right accepts an invisible gift from the goddesses.
The essential virtue, he insists, is learning to receive—allowing ourselves to be changed by what others offer us, so we can later give in return. Mona is unsettled by this call to “grow up,” but she plays along, and the two conspire to tell her parents she is seeing a certain “Dr. Botticelli” each Wednesday.
The next week, Henry brings her to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, chosen partly because they share a name. Again Mona looks, this time more fascinated than bored.
Henry tells her about Leonardo’s obsessive layering of transparent glazes, the hazy landscape behind the sitter, and the painter’s idea that images trigger “mirror emotions”—if you see someone yawning, you yawn; if you see someone smile, you are invited to smile too.
The painting, he says, whispers a lesson: smile at life even when the world behind you is chaotic and barely formed. Mona tries to smile back at the painting; instead, moved by her grandfather’s words and the fragility of her own eyesight, she finds her eyes brimming with tears.
Between Wednesdays, the domestic plot threads thicken. At night Mona overhears her parents arguing: Paul drinks to drown his financial panic and sense of failure; Camille seethes at his passivity and at having to hold the family together.
Mona adores them both but instinctively leans on Henry for stability. At school, she navigates friendships with Jade and Lili and the threat of Guillaume, an older boy who bullies younger kids and floats between menace and vulnerability.
As the weeks pass at the Louvre and Orsay, each artwork commentary mirrors something happening in Mona’s life.
Goya’s monsters hint at the hidden cruelties in the schoolyard; Rosa Bonheur’s animals underline respect for the non-human; Camille Claudel’s sculptures open a conversation about desire and mental illness; Klimt’s gold and skulls teach her that love and death are interlaced.
The structure is deliberately didactic: a slice of daily life, a museum visit, and a reflective conversation in which Henry draws out a lesson—often phrased in a short imperative, like “use the ancient as your future” or “let feelings be expressed.”
Underneath, the central tensions grow. Mona’s sight flickers once or twice—brief episodes of darkness that resolve quickly, but each time the threat feels closer. Her parents’ relationship deteriorates, pushed by money worries and Paul’s drinking.
Mona herself begins to sense that there is some secret around her grandmother Colette, whose name is never spoken, though Mona knows she once wore the same tiny seashell pendant that now hangs around Mona’s neck and around Henry’s.
Part 2: Family secrets, black paintings, and an open-ended ending
Roughly halfway through the year, the setting shifts from Orsay to Beaubourg and to modern and contemporary art.
Kandinsky’s abstractions become a way of talking about the “spiritual” in everyday life; Duchamp’s urinal and readymades teach Mona that some art aims to shock and destabilize; Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits lead to a conversation about pain that doesn’t destroy you but forces you to transform.
The emotional stakes rise in parallel.
Camille and Paul eventually separate under the pressure of his alcoholism and her exhaustion; Mona moves between them, bewildered. Henry, while devoted to his granddaughter, is increasingly conscious of his own frailty and of the promise he once made to Colette about choosing the terms of one’s death.
The novel gradually reveals that Mona’s earlier episode of blindness is not just a random vascular event.
Through a mixture of medical investigation and psychological reconstruction, Henry and others uncover the buried trauma linked to her grandmother’s death years before.
Colette, Henry’s wife and Mona’s beloved grandmother, had been a public campaigner for the right to die with dignity, convinced that people should be free to choose their death rather than endure agonizing end-of-life decline.
When Colette herself developed a rare degenerative brain disease—a mix of Parkinson- and Alzheimer-type symptoms—she ultimately chose euthanasia in a foreign clinic, accompanied by Henry, despite Camille’s furious opposition.
Before leaving, she gave little Mona a shell pendant, telling her to “keep the light inside” her. The adults then locked the whole episode in silence. Mona retained only a fuzzy sense of loss and the talisman around her neck.
Years later, the truth presses back into consciousness through her eyes. A critical analysis in French cites the novel’s explanation: each time Mona has removed or lost the pendant—while doing her homework, at her father’s flea market, in front of a painting by Hammershøi—she has been hit by a sudden attack of blindness.
Doctors find no physical lesion; instead, her mind is “screaming its buried pain,” and the neurologist concludes she suffers from a psychosomatic condition that literally “hangs by a thread” on her necklace.
Around the same time, Henry finally speaks openly about Colette: her Catholicism, her father’s heroic suicide in a Nazi prison, her activism for euthanasia in Belgium and Switzerland, and the cruel illness that robbed her of language and memory.
When she realized her mind was collapsing, she chose to die before becoming, in her words, an “inert body that only breathes,” and Henry honored the promise he once made to her on a beach where they collected the seashell now hanging from Mona’s neck.
For Mona, this revelation is both a blow and a key. She understands, for the first time, why the adults froze whenever she mentioned her grandmother. She sees that her own fear of blindness is entangled with fear of death, abandonment, and the guilt of being the child who was “left behind” when Colette chose to go. The shell, once a lucky charm, becomes the physical link between vision and loss.
One of the late chapters, focused on Marina Abramović, brings these threads together. Before visiting the installation, Mona delivers an impromptu classroom talk on the term “euthanasia,” defining it in front of her stunned teacher and classmates as the courageous decision of someone who is very ill to choose a dignified death, after discussion with doctors and loved ones.
The scene is shocking because of her age but also cathartic: she is finally giving words to the taboo that has shaped her family.
In Abramović’s dark, mineral installation, where visitors lie on stone beds holding copper and quartz, Mona experiences an intense plunge into darkness that is not terrifying but strangely nourishing.
The performance art, Henry explains, is about letting go of burdens, including people or roles we love, to step into a new life. Separation, he tells her, is also a kind of “departure” that can signal a beginning as much as an end.
The lesson is aimed both at Camille’s separation from Paul and at the looming possibility of illness and death in the family.
As they approach the end of the fifty-two Wednesdays, Henry feels a different dread.
The external project—one painting per week before Mona might go blind—is almost complete. The critical pamphlet I drew on notes that he wonders whether his life will still have meaning once the year is over and confesses that, with his aging heart and memories of Colette’s choice, he sometimes thinks of his own end.
But his love for Mona keeps pulling him back to the present.
The penultimate and final chapters revolve around two works: Christian Boltanski, with his archives of anonymous lives, and Pierre Soulages, whose immense black canvases shimmer with light. Boltanski allows Henry to talk to Mona about memory—how to “archive yourself” and others so that love outlives bodies.
Soulages offers the most direct confrontation with the darkness that has stalked the novel from the first page.
Standing in front of Soulages’s deep, textured black, Mona understands why her grandfather saved this work for last. In one of the quotations reproduced by critics, she concludes that “black is a color… a color stretching as far as the eye can see.”
Instead of thinking of black as mere absence, she now sees it as a space dense with hidden reflections; the grooves in the paint catch and redirect light. Symbolically, the potential blindness ahead of her is no longer an empty void but a different way of experiencing the world—through the “reservoir” of images Henry has helped her accumulate, and through touch, sound, and imagination.
It is after Soulages that the novel’s emotional climax quietly unfolds. Henry finally tells Mona the full story of Colette’s illness and euthanasia, including the happy, almost festive farewell dinner with friends and the last words she spoke to her granddaughter about keeping the light within.
Mona now understands that her own intermittent blindness echoes Colette’s fear of losing her mind and language.
Rather than being crushed, she seems steadier: the truth, brutal as it is, fits with everything she has been learning all year about death, loss, and the stubborn persistence of beauty.
The epilogue and the ending explained
Mona’s Eyes ends with an epilogue titled “Go towards what you risk,” a phrase that sums up Henry’s entire educational project. By the time we reach it, three things are clear:
- Mona’s medical condition remains uncertain. The doctors never discover a physical cause for her crises; the psychosomatic explanation tied to Colette and the pendant accounts for the attacks so far, but the possibility of future blindness is never completely ruled out.
The marketing copy of the novel emphasizes that she has fifty-two weeks before she “may lose her sight forever,” not that she inevitably will.
- The real resolution is psychological and spiritual, not medical. Through the artworks and conversations, Mona has learned to name her fears, to see separation as change rather than pure catastrophe, and to understand death—including voluntary death like Colette’s—not only as horror but as a choice loaded with love and dignity, even if she does not fully agree with it.
- Henry has succeeded in creating the “reservoir” he dreamed of. Mona now carries within her a gallery of remembered images, stories, and phrases—Botticelli’s chain of giving and receiving, Leonardo’s subtle smile, Goya’s nightmares, Kahlo’s resilience, Abramović’s dark stones, Soulages’s luminous black. Even if her eyes fail, those lessons won’t.
The epilogue, without staging a dramatic death or miracle cure, underlines a shift:
Mona is no longer purely a child being protected. She is someone who can “go towards what [she] risk[s],” whether that risk is blindness, grief, or simply the unknown shape of her life. Henry, for his part, has found a form of continuity that reassures him even against his own mortality: whatever happens to his body or his remaining eye, his love and his way of looking at the world now live on in Mona.
So the ending is deliberately open. We do not see Mona definitively go blind on the page, nor do we watch Henry die.
The classical suspense—“will Mona lose her sight?”—is never neatly resolved, which can feel anticlimactic if you expect a big final twist. Instead, Schlesser closes on an ethical and emotional answer rather than a diagnostic one.
Mona has been prepared to face either outcome, and readers are asked to accept that, in real life, some threats never fully disappear; we just learn how to live alongside them.
In that sense, the novel’s last movement echoes Soulages’s canvases. The darkness hasn’t gone away, but it has been transformed into a place where light rebounds in unexpected ways.
Mona stands on the threshold of adolescence with the memory of fifty-two masterpieces shimmering inside her, ready, as the epilogue title suggests, to step toward what she risks instead of backing away.
4. Mona’s Eyes Analysis
4.1 Mona’s Eyes Characters
Mona and Henry are written as a classic odd couple—small, frightened, and secretly fierce child; towering, wounded, fiercely articulate grandfather—but what kept me reading was the way their relationship keeps slipping between lesson, play, and mutual care.
Henry could easily have felt like a pompous mouthpiece for the author’s art-historical expertise, and some reviewers do experience him that way, yet within the book he is also a man quietly cracking under the weight of his own losses.
We glimpse his severity in the rule that Colette must never be mentioned, but we also see his tenderness in the way he kneels to speak with Mona “eye to eye”, lowering his gangly frame so that his “mineral voice” can cut through the museum noise and reach only her.
His promise that if she truly looks at the artworks, “there’ll be no need to go” to the psychiatrist—sworn, naturally, “on all that’s beautiful on earth”—is at once an act of magical thinking, a slightly manipulative bargain, and an almost desperate faith in what looking can do.
Mona herself is deliberately precocious, sometimes improbably so, which has irritated some readers who find her too “perfect” or passive; yet for me her quiet rebellions are some of the book’s strongest scenes.
When she refuses to look down under the bullying gaze of older girls—sitting there “busy storing up all that was most beautiful in the world” until her aggressor dissolves into tears and Mona ends the incident with a disarming “Hey, it’s okay, that’s enough, let’s forget it”—the novel makes moral courage look like simply keeping your gaze steady.
Around them spin secondary characters—Mona’s overworked parents, the sometimes harsh doctors and teachers, the occasional classmates—who are sketched quickly but efficiently, mostly as foils for the intense, private world Mona and Henry build in the galleries.
4.2 Mona’s Eyes Themes and Symbolism
Where the character writing becomes most interesting, in my view, is when Schlesser allows the artworks themselves to behave like characters, exerting pressure on Mona’s development and occasionally contradicting Henry’s tidy morals.
One early turning point comes in front of Botticelli’s Venus and the Three Graces, where Henry explains that the Graces represent “the three stages that make us sociable and hospitable beings”: knowing how to give, knowing how to receive, and knowing how to give back.
What matters most, he insists, is the middle stage, that “knowing how to receive”, which he calls “absolutely fundamental” because you can only give again what you have first accepted.
The scene is emblematic of the book’s central theme: in a culture that overvalues productivity and self-sufficiency, simply letting yourself be changed by beauty, love, or help from others is framed as a radical skill Mona must practice.
Later, facing Rembrandt’s self-portrait, Henry explains chiaroscuro with the fabulous line, “With chiaroscuro, black was no longer offensive to color, or its negation; it became its loudhailer,” turning darkness itself into a kind of amplifier rather than enemy.
By the time Mona encounters Marina Abramović’s copper “dragons” and chooses to repeat the whole ritual blindfolded, discovering that touch, balance, and body awareness can replace sight, the motif of learning alternative ways of perceiving the world—of starting to live as if blindness were already here without letting it define her—is fully earned.
Running alongside this is a quieter theme of repetition and beginning again: Mona hears Bergman’s cinematic lesson to “start from scratch again, always start from scratch again”, a mantra that becomes almost shockingly important near Mona’s Eyes‘ end.
That insistence on rebuilding from ruins, combined with René Char’s lines about how “failure is of no moment, even if all is lost”, makes the novel oddly bracing rather than simply sad, especially for readers who have lived through their own medical or emotional collapses.
If I had to name one symbolic thread that stays with me, it’s this repeated invitation to turn potential blindness—literal or metaphorical—into a different way of sensing, where what counts is not what you can see but how deeply you let the world in.
5. Evaluation
5.1 Strengths / pleasant experiences
As a reading experience, Mona’s Eyes is at its best when it trusts the quiet power of looking and lets scenes unfold slowly instead of rushing to the next life lesson.
Many of the set-pieces are genuinely moving: the cracked fresco with the Three Graces, the Rembrandt self-portrait that turns black paint into revelation, the Cézanne landscape that suddenly looks to Mona like something she herself could draw, and the Abramović installation she decides to “read” with her body instead of her eyes.
Schlesser is unusually good at translating static visual compositions into language without killing their mystery, often pausing to describe the material details—the fissures in ancient plaster, the way a collage eye squints, the sag of a pregnant body in a Hannah Höch portrait—before nudging us toward interpretation.
As a result, Mona’s Eyes doubles as an armchair museum tour: if you’ve never been to Paris, you finish with a vivid map in your head of corridors, staircases, and suddenly luminous rooms.
5.2 Weaknesses / negative experiences
The weaknesses are real, though, and worth acknowledging if you’re trying to decide whether this is your kind of book.
At times Henry’s explanations slip into a slightly overbearing, teacher-voice monologue, and some of the dialogue—especially in English translation, with exclamations like “Holy smokes!”—can feel stiff or dated, a criticism echoed by several Anglophone reviewers who find the mix of story and art lecture “painfully clunky.”
Personally, I sometimes wished Mona would push back harder against her grandfather’s certainties or offer more of her own interpretations, rather than always absorbing his; that imbalance is the price the novel pays for wanting to be both guidebook and narrative.
5.3 Impact (on me as a reader)
And yet, despite those reservations, I closed the book feeling my own way of walking through museums had been quietly rewired.
Since finishing it, I’ve caught myself slowing down in front of a single painting, trying to do a “Henry and Mona Wednesday” by staying put for five minutes, saying nothing, then asking what the image is trying to make me receive rather than what clever thing I can say about it.
In that sense, Mona’s Eyes reminded me less of heavy art-novels and more of accessible initiatory fictions like Sophie’s World or Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist—books whose real plot happens in the reader’s head as their own questions shift—even though Schlesser’s canvas is denser and much more anchored in specific artworks and historical context.
Where it differs from those predecessors is in its unapologetic focus on intergenerational care: Henry is not a mysterious stranger or a mythic guide, he’s a slightly vain, very tired grandfather who uses the only tools he has—stories and paintings—to keep his granddaughter afloat, and that ordinariness makes the book feel usable, not just admirable.
The broader literary ecosystem seems to agree that something here is resonating: beyond French bestseller lists and translation deals, the Barnes & Noble award has thrown it into English-language mainstream conversations, while book clubs and language classes are seizing on it as a springboard to talk about art and ethics.
The planned screen adaptation, still in development as of late 2025, will have to decide whether to lean into sentiment, art-historical spectacle, or the darker ethical questions around disability and euthanasia that some French commentators already find unsettling in the novel.
5.4 Comparison with similar works
Because filming has not yet begun and no casting or release date has been announced, there is no box-office data to compare, only the speculation that a story built around visits to recognisable masterpieces will tempt both arthouse and prestige-TV producers.
For now, the only meaningful “numbers” we can assess are the reading ones—sales, translations, bookstore prizes—and they already place Mona’s Eyes in the unusual category of an art novel that has truly broken out of the niche to become a mass-market phenomenon.
That mass readership, and the way the book is being used in classrooms and book clubs, makes it a particularly rich lens through which to think about contemporary debates on arts education and wellbeing.
6. Personal insight
As someone who has taught literature and sometimes smuggled art slides into classrooms, I kept reading Mona’s Eyes as a case study in how narrative can function as stealth curriculum.
In policy circles, there is growing evidence that structured arts education improves critical thinking, creativity, and even academic results—a 2025 meta-analysis, for instance, finds consistent positive effects of arts instruction on problem-solving and spatial reasoning, while earlier work at Brookings highlights gains in social-emotional skills and civic engagement.
At the same time, museum-based wellbeing trials in places like Italy, Montreal, and Neuchâtel are formalising what Henry does informally with Mona: they design “prescribed” encounters with art for people in distress and measure reductions in anxiety, depression, and physiological stress markers over time.
Reading the novel against this backdrop, I kept thinking that what feels like sentimental fiction at first glance is actually a fictional prototype of what some therapists and educators are now doing in clinics and schools.
On a more personal level, the way the book marries story and syllabus resonated with the kind of work you already explore on Probinism, where essays on films like A Man for All Seasons or novels such as Absalom, Absalom! treat narrative as a way into ethics, history, and political consciousness rather than mere entertainment.
Mona’s Eyes could easily sit alongside those pieces as a more overtly educational cousin, one that asks young readers to see aesthetic experience itself as a form of moral and emotional training.
If I had to define a specific contemporary educational angle this novel illuminates, it would be “art literacy as emotional first aid for children facing medical uncertainty.”
In practical terms, that suggests very concrete classroom practices—weekly “single artwork” sessions, personal visual diaries, intergenerational museum visits—that echo Henry’s rule of looking at exactly one work in silence before talking, a method that slows attention in a world addicted to scrolling.
Imagine, for instance, pairing a chapter of Mona’s Eyes with an actual visit—physical or virtual—to the Louvre or a local gallery, then asking students to write a short scene in which an artwork “talks back” to them; it’s the kind of hybrid exercise that aligns neatly with current calls to integrate arts across the curriculum rather than ghettoising them in one weekly period.
You could also weave in very recent research or popular summaries—from reports like the UK’s culture-and-wellbeing study or accessible pieces on museum health programmes in Psychology Today—to let students test Henry’s claims about art against empirical data, not just fictional outcomes.
In that sense, the book is less a self-contained masterpiece than a starter kit, a narrative spine on which teachers, parents, or book-club leaders can hang their own activities, discussions, and local artworks.
Used this way, Mona’s Eyes stops being just a moving story about illness and becomes a tool for building exactly the kind of calm, reflective, aesthetically literate attention that so many studies now suggest is protective for mental health.
7. Mona’s Eyes Quotes
A few lines have stayed with me almost like maxims: Henry’s promise, “We’ll go to the museum together to see a work of art—a single work of art, only one,” his oath “on all that’s beautiful on earth,” and his explanation that with Rembrandt “black was no longer offensive to color; it became its loudhailer.”
Equally haunting is the simple injunction Mona takes from Botticelli—“knowing how to receive”—and Bergman’s echoed line, “Start from scratch again, always start from scratch again,” which together sketch a philosophy of resilience that feels oddly usable far beyond the pages of the novel.
8. Conclusion & recommendation
Taken as a whole, I’d recommend Mona’s Eyes warmly to patient, reflective readers—especially art lovers, teachers, grandparents, and older teens—who are willing to forgive a certain didactic earnestness in exchange for a deeply felt, surprisingly ambitious meditation on how looking at beautiful, troubling things can help us face what we most fear losing.
