The Spy in the Museum: How Rose Valland Saved Art from the Nazis

The color palette of this book captures both the feeling of gloom under the Nazi occupation and the sense of an art museum with it's gold and brown tones that are similar to many picture frames. I loved the white on peach sketches of Paris on the end papers. The scenes of Paris often have a cinematic quality to them, but the renderings of the inside of the museum under Nazi occupation have a crowded, hectic quality to them. Young readers might not know much about World War II, but the pictures offer a feeling of what life was like at the time.

While this doesn't go into a lot of details about the war or the atrocities the Nazis committed, it does have a good message about doing what one can under perilous circumstances. It would have been nice to include a photograph of Valland, and this definitely left me wanting to read more about this interesting art curator.

There are a few books fictional books for middle grade and young adult readers that deal with art during World War II, like Cameron's Artifice, Konigsberg's The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World, Hicks' The Dark Skies Mystery: A World War II Thriller, or Fitzgerald's Under the Egg, and even the nonfiction The Greatest Treasure Hunt in History: The Story of the Monuments Men by Edsel, but I haven't seen much for younger readers. There are a number of picture books about art and artists, and The Spy in the Museum is a great book to have in a gallery with other art related works like Paley and Tentler-Krylov's Love Is Hard Work: The Art and Heart of Corita Kent, Aloise's Dogs in Art: A Canine History of Art, MacColl and Chavarri's Lady of the Lines: How Maria Reiche Saved the Nazca Lines by Sweeping the Desert, and Rogers;s and Innerst's Joan Mitchell Paints a Symphony.