Cute! But then I love museums. ( )

Anna at the Art Museum by Hazel Hutchins & Gail Herbert is a great book to introduce children to great works of art and museums. The story is about a young girl names Anna who visits the museum with her mother. Anna is not impressed. There are too many rules and everything is boring, that is until she visits the "secret room". A wonderful story to teach children about art imitating life. I had to read this twice to pick up on the secret in the illustrations. My grandson was able to see it almost immediately. I guess I was concentrating on Anna's behaviour, and he was looking at the art. It was the illustrations that bumped this one up to 5 stars for me. The story is beautifully enhanced by illustrations with actual images of real pieces of art scattered throughout this fictional museum. There are many well known pieces of art depicted from galleries around the world. At the back of the book there is a section, "About the Art" where each work of art that is seen in the earlier pages is cited, making this a fun "seek and find" book as well to learn more and extend the book through activity. It takes almost the whole book, but Anna finally finds the magic in the art and appreciates it for the beauty and wonder it is. The publisher, Annick Press Ltd., generously provided me with a copy of this book to read. The ideas and opinions shared are my own. ( )

Anna's mother brings her to the art museum, and Anna is boooooored: there's "No shouting. No running. No climbing. No touching." She is repeatedly cautioned by her mother and the security guard. But the guard isn't all bad; when Anna peeks through a half-open door, he lets her into the workshop where gallery staff are restoring some paintings. Suddenly the museum is more exciting.

Anna and her mother are charming, their sweet, cartoonish forms set against the realistic museum background.

Back matter includes information about all of the art in the galleries, a range from many different eras and countries. ( )

“If only the museum could be turned inside out. Or the world outside in.”

“When a door is half open, it is very hard not to wonder what is on the other side.”

Anna, who is very small, has been brought to an art museum for the very first time, and is she ever cross! With her stuffed toy beside her, she sits grumpily on a sofa below a portrait of a beautiful woman, who looks benignly and thoughtfully down on her. While her mother is purchasing tickets to see all these “old and boring” things, Anna resolves that she’ll just have to entertain herself. And she proceeds to do just that. To the embarrassment of her mother and the horror of the museum attendant, she plays peekaboo with a baby whose mother is taking in the oriental exhibit. Anna almost knocks over a fragile antique vase in the process. In another room, she attempts to climb the platform on which a contemporary geometric sculpture with a red sphere at its centre is perched; it looks a little like a jungle gym . . . maybe. Later, an alarm goes off when Anna tries to touch an oil by Michelangelo. With hands over his ears, the security guard rushes past Edvard Munch’s famous painting, “The Scream”, to stop her. There’s an adventure—or a near disaster—in almost every room.

What Anna doesn’t observe, but which observant readers figure out soon enough, is that in every room of the museum, the famous pieces of art are matched by something in real life. In the peekaboo game, which occurs in the room where an eighteenth-century Japanese ink-on-silk painting of a mother and child hangs, the real child Anna engages with is of Japanese ancestry, as is his mother. The red sphere at the centre of the modern sculpture is like the red ball another child visitor rolls on the floor of the museum. That child’s father and grandmother stand behind him, posed almost exactly like the figures in a Breuze painting. Schoolgirls touring the museum are wearing outfits that resemble those in another piece of art, and the legs of tall museum-goers resemble the trunks of trees in a work by Seurat. Art reflects life—or maybe life reflects art?

Anna catches on eventually. The museum attendant takes pity on her when he sees her look longingly at a half-opened door that seems to lead to “a secret workshop”. He allows her to go into the room on the other side, where cleaning and restoration work are done. As chance would have it, a conservator is just removing grime from a painting of a very grumpy girl. The scales correspondingly fall from Anna’s eyes—so to speak. “She’s just like me,” she exclaims. “Or I’m just like her.”

Authors Hazel Hutchins and Gail Herbert, along with artist Lil Crump, have created a delightful and clever picture book. Real works of art are included in the illustrations—paintings, prints, scrolls, and sculptures. At the end of the book, the reader can find thumbnails and short descriptions of all the famous paintings (but not the other art objects). This is a book that needs to be pored over to be appreciated. It’s easy enough for parents to share such a book at home with their kids, but in a school or library setting, the use of a document camera is advised.

Thanks to Net Galley and Annick Press for providing me with a digital copy of the book for review purposes. ( )