The Mona Lisa Vanishes

I got The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, A Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity by Nicholas Day (with art by Brett Helquist) from the library after seeing it won the Sibert Medal for this year (most distinguished informational book for children). The book description says, "On a hot August day in Paris, just over a century ago, a desperate guard burst into the office of the director of the Louvre and shouted, La Joconde, c’est partie! The Mona Lisa, she’s gone! No one knew who was behind the heist. Was it an international gang of thieves? Was it an art-hungry American millionaire? Was it the young Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, who was about to remake the very art of painting? Travel back to an extraordinary period of revolutionary change: turn-of-the-century Paris. Walk its backstreets. Meet the infamous thieves—and detectives—of the era. And then slip back further in time and follow Leonardo da Vinci, painter of the Mona Lisa, through his dazzling, wondrously weird life. Discover the secret at the heart of the Mona Lisa—the most famous painting in the world should never have existed at all."

This was an interesting read. I enjoyed learning the story of the theft of the Mona Lisa and how that is what made the painting so famous. I also liked learning more about Leonardo da Vinci. I wasn't a huge fan of the format of the book (jumping between different interconnected stories) and wasn't always completely engaged, but I do think the author did a great job as a storyteller and trying to make a story like this interesting for kids. I think this was almost a "liked it" rating, but I didn't like it as much as all the other "liked it" books I read this year, so I feel like I had to go one notch lower. (But I do feel terribly guilty doing that for a Sibert award winner. It still was a good one!)

Rating: * (1/3 = It was okay)