The Mind's Eye

Eighty-eight-year old Elva and Courtney, an attractive sixteen-year-old with a severed spinal chord, lie in adjacent beds in a grim Bismarck, North Dakota convalescent home. Ignored by the world, the only resource they have left is their imagination. As Elva and Courtney go on a fantasy trip to Italy (accompanied by Elva's long dead husband and guided by a 1910 travel book), Elva shows Courtney a new way to envision love. But to accept it, and the gift of the imagination, Courtney must make the trip her own--even if she destroys the art Elva holds most dear. Written entirely in dialogue, Mind's Eyecan be performed as reader's theater, but it is a fully satisfying novel. In this extraordinarily innovative, profound, and yet readable book Paul Fleischman makes us all feel what a powerful--and dangerous--tool the imagination can be.

Paul Fleischman won a Newbery Medal for Joyful Noise and a Newbery Honor for Graven Images. His most recent novel, Whirligig, was voted a Best Book of the Year by Publisher's Weekly, School Library Journal, and Booklist, and a Notable Book by the New York Times. Paul Fleischman lives in Monterey, California.