From School Library Journal
Grade 4-8–Following up on
Art Fraud Detective (Kingfisher, 2000), Nilsen offers another opportunity for detail-oriented students to pore over fine works of art and solve a mystery. The night before an auction, Henry, the auctioneer, is sent an anonymous e-mail suggesting that 16 of the 34 paintings are fakes. He enlists readers' help by providing information on four gangs of forgers, including their level of expertise and how much they get paid for their copies. Readers are then asked to identify the fakes and figure out how much money the crafty collector paid for them. Henry suggests creating a spreadsheet to fill in all the relevant data. This is a complex task made more interesting by the addition of the mathematics component. The meticulous solution is provided at the end. The high-quality glossy paper allows for excellent reproductions of paintings by Whistler, Warhol, Fra Angelico, Cézanne, and Renoir, among others. The auction catalog itself shows the paintings above short biographies of the artists and includes a description of their style. There is also a smaller image of the actual work of art that readers can use to determine the authenticity of the piece. This is a nice browsing title even if students don't solve the mystery. If your library has budding sleuths who are ready for a more complex challenge and who like art, this is the book for them.
–Linda M. Kenton, San Rafael Public Library, CA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Gr. 5-8. Nilsen combines art appreciation, decoding skills, computation, and a sense of adventure into a single, coherent package. Following an explanation of the art forgery game that is afoot and suggestions on how to look for the forgers' telltale signs, which are rendered in comics style, readers are called on to consider a catalog of 34 famous paintings, 16 of which are fakes about to go on the auction block. By finding the fakes, noting how many mistakes each has, and doing some math, the reader is on the way to cracking the case of who forged what and who coordinated the operation. The paintings include Mary Cassatt's
The Tea and Rembrandt's
Artemisia. Each artwork is reproduced twice, once without changes and a second time with possible mistakes. Give this to kids who enjoy art, love games, and don't think that a book always has to be read from front to back.
Francisca GoldsmithCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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