Ask a Bookseller: ‘Mona’s Eyes’ by Thomas Schlesser

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

It’s that time of year when readers start to catalogue their favorite books of 2025, and for bookseller Kelly Evert, that book is “Mona’s Eyes” by Thomas Schlesser.

Evert works at Village Books and Paper Dreams, with locations in Bellingham and Lynden, Washington.

When a young girl named Mona, living in Paris, learns she’s going to go blind, her grandfather determines to show her as much visual art as he can while she can still see.

Once a week, over the course of a year, he takes her to the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay and other French galleries, where they focus on a piece of art each time. Evert appreciated both the art discussions and the relationship between Mona and her grandfather.

“It’s just very beautiful and loving,” says Evert, who added that the dust jacket of the hardcover book includes images of all the featured artwork.

Art lovers will immediately recognize that the famed eyes on the cover belong to Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” not the Mona Lisa, though Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece is one of the 52 works of art featured in the book.