It’s wonderful to be here with all of you. I’d like to thank my agent, Brenda Bowen; my editor, Annie Kelley, and everyone at Random House Studio; and illustrator Brett Helquist, of course, who is a wizard.

Thank you to the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards Committee for this honor.

[Read Horn Book reviews of the 2024 BGHB Nonfiction and Poetry winners.]

I am new in this part of the world — not Boston, but the part of the world where you stand at the lectern in front of a room of distinguished attendees and security lets you stay there. And to demonstrate just how new I am, I’d like to tell a somewhat embarrassing story that I’ll regret later.

In the months before this book was released, I was on the internet, which I do not recommend, and I happened to notice that there were people on the internet who had read the book, and who had thoughts about the book, which was confusing because the book did not really exist yet. I had a copy of the book, and I felt pretty special about that, but now it turned out that all these other people also had copies of the book, and those people — and I do not want to be unkind here — but those people had not even written the book.

So, I wrote my editor, Annie Kelley, about these strange people on the internet, and she wrote back — and Annie is a sophisticated person, so she would not do this — but in my memory it was in all-caps and without any punctuation, like it was a single, strung-out word:

NICKDONOTREADTHEGOODREADSREVIEWS

I stand before you a changed person.

But in the time before I was redeemed, I saw that a few people expressed concerns that the book had a point of view.

This objection had honestly — and I told you that this would be ­embarrassing — but it had honestly never entered my mind.

I want to be clear for those of you who have not read the book. It is a work of narrative nonfiction about an art heist. It takes place in early-twentieth-century Paris and Renaissance Italy. It is the furthest thing from an op-ed, although if it were an op-ed, it would be, I suppose, an op-ed against art heists.

Do not steal art. That’s just my suggested headline. The New York Times can give it whatever headline they want.

I want to linger here for a moment because these comments are sympto­matic of something larger, and also — and this is important — because those people were right.

Because The Mona Lisa Vanishes has fingerprints all over it. It touches on conspiracy theories, for example, and the uses and abuses of narrative. The point is that it did not have to touch on such things. They are not central to the plot. They are not part of the plot at all. But they are the things that make this book good to think with. They are the things that make its story worth telling.

And although no one would question that the best nonfiction books for adults — or older children, as I think of them — have a voice and a presence, that’s still regarded as somewhat problematic for children. These are all the things that make nonfiction worth reading for us, and yet children are somehow — for some reason — supposed­ to read it without these things.

This is a book that was written by a person. What those people were asking for — even if they did not know it — was a book that was not written by a person.

This is the information-entertainment line that the genre has long had to walk, and so I am not, of course, telling anyone who writes nonfiction for children anything new. It’s a testament to how good their balance is that there are so many exceptional past winners of this award.

But then again, that’s not an accident. This is an award with a long tradition of honoring somewhat unusual books, and I am humbled to be part of that tradition. Somewhat unusual nonfiction books have not always been welcomed. Their unusualness — their point of view, or the presence of a person behind the book — makes their nonfiction status, their informational status, a little suspect.

But I’d wager that the best books are at least a little bit suspect.

From the January/February 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. For more on the 2024 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, click on the tag BGHB24.