Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
The Mona Lisa Caper
For ages 6 to 9
Tundra Books, 2005 ISBN: 978-0887767265
The Mona Lisa is tired. She has been hanging on the wall for more than five hundred years and she really wishes she could have a vacation. Why she hasn’t even seen Paris, the city all around and about her. One day Mona Lisa gets her wish. A maintenance worker in the museum where she hangs takes the Mona Lisa from the museum.
Mona Lisa is very fond of the man who liberates her. When she hung in the museum, Vincenzo used to eat his lunch as he looked and talked to her, and now that she out of the museum Vincenzo shares more of this life with her. He tells Mona Lisa how homesick for Italy he is and then he decides that the time has come for both of them to go home for Mona Lisa was created in Italy hundreds of years before.
This remarkable tale told from the point of view of a famous painting is based on the true story of the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911. Mona Lisa beautifully describes the people and places that she sees on her adventure and one cannot help sympathizing with her as she tries, and fails, to communicate. This is a wonderful tribute not only to one of the most famous paintings in the world but also, to the man who thought he was doing the right thing when he retuned the Mona Lisa to Italy.
Detailed illustrations in rich colors perfectly compliment the text.