Eighty-eight-year old Elva and Courtney, an attractive sixteen-year-old with a severed spinal cord, 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, The Mind's Eye can 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.

© 2025 Henry Holt and Co. (Ebook): 9781466860261

Release date

Ebook: 16 October 2025