Mona and her grandfather’s weekly museum visits offer her an atypical throughway into exploring common aspects of the human experience. At the start of the novel, Mona is just 10 years old and has few emotional skills to navigate her complicated, unresolved ophthalmological condition. When she experiences her first TIA, the narrator remarks that “A child of ten, settled and anxious, expresses distress bluntly, without embellishment or lyricism” (1). Since Mona is young and naïve, she is unaware of how to make sense of her internal experience, but connecting with art helps her learn more about herself. Through Mona’s experiences, the novel presents art education as emotional formation.

Initially, when Mona experiences intense emotions, she will cry or self-isolate. Her ophthalmologist worries that if Mona were to lose her eyesight, she would have trouble navigating the emotional and psychological repercussions, which is why he recommends she start seeing a psychiatrist. Her grandfather inserts himself into this vital aspect of her mental health care, convinced that an education in art history will in fact be a worthier way to guide Mona into a more adult understanding of human emotions: “If one day Mona became permanently blind, she would at least have the benefit of a kind of reservoir, deep in her brain, from which to draw some visual splendors” (17). Over the course of their weekly museum visits, Dadé teaches Mona about countless works of art, underscoring art’s power to evoke emotions and clarify ineffable aspects of being alive.

Each work of art Mona and Dadé visit offers a throughway into a new emotional exploration, or wider truth about humanity. The novel’s overarching narrative structure enacts this phenomenon: Schlesser’s use of titling guides the reader into the chapters by offering the name of the artist the characters will study and the overarching lesson they’ll garner from it. Since Dadé and Mona both share their interpretations of each piece of artwork, the conclusions they draw are collaborative. Dadé teaches Mona that there is no right or wrong way to experience art—whatever she feels from viewing art is valid and essential to understanding her own emotional interior:

Stop apologizing when you think your feelings don’t conform to what’s expected of you. You’re free to feel whatever you like. And I’ll go one better: your uneasiness in front of this painting in which Magritte evokes an unsettling, lugubrious atmosphere is proof that you know how to look at this painting, that you find in it what the artist put in it. (400)

Dadé is teaching Mona that an education in art is an education in the self and the psyche. Whatever Mona sees, feels, and experiences while viewing the artwork is correct, because her internal experience is valid in its own right. Each work might contain its own identifiable elements or ideas, but each one elicits a unique response from each viewer.

Over the course of the novel, Mona learns to apply the esoteric lessons she learns from her art education to her own experience. Lessons about control, detachment, romance, and transformation help her to navigate her parents’ arguments, father’s financial struggles, mother’s constant worrying, best friend’s move away, and her own eye condition. Thus, the more she immerses herself in art, the better she understands herself and her emotions.