Mason lives with his mother. When school’s out, he usually plays outside with his friends, but this summer, those friends are all at camp. The lonely Mason wishes desperately for something exciting to happen. When his mum comes home from work, she offers to take him to the museum. They used to go quite often when Mason was younger, and though he feels he’s outgrown it, the boy agrees to go along. While Mason stares at Maria’s Summer Day, the girl in the painting starts moving. She even talks to him! Before he knows it, he’s agreed to change places with her for a minute so she can experience the outside world. But when the girl doesn’t come back straightaway, Mason panics. He beats his fists on the inside of the painting, knocking it from the wall. Mason becomes lost in a Stygian netherworld, travelling among paintings and pursued by a green-eyed monster. Will he ever find his way free? Masters’ flat prose and dialogue, written in the third-person past tense (“Mason passed the hours by drawing, watching TV, or tossing a ball into the air in the backyard. Late into the afternoon, from the backyard Mason heard the front door open and close again”), makes the story easy to read but not especially engaging. Mason undergoes a nightmarish experience but there is little sense of causality and insufficient detail to animate his travails. As such, his bewilderment is observed rather than felt, and readers will miss out on the full chill of being lost between paintings. Mason himself, though—like the paintings when observed from the outside—is given only a cursory characterization. The concept itself is quite thrilling, and Masters taps into a rich vein of imagination.