Sixteen-year-old Eli has already decided he doesn't care. When a school assignment sends him to a Salt Lake City rest home in 2018, the last thing he expects is to become entangled in the unfinished story of Annette, a hundred-year-old woman whose memories reach back to Nazi-occupied Paris. In 1940, twenty-two-year-old Annette is a junior museum guide when the German occupation transforms the world around her. As Jewish collections are seized, paintings disappear, and museums become instruments of theft, she witnesses the quiet resistance of people determined to preserve more than art. Inspired by the real work of Rose Valland, Annette begins keeping a record of her own-a list that runs in the opposite direction from the inventories of the looters, preserving the names, objects, and stories others are trying to erase. Nearly eighty years later, Eli begins following the traces Annette left behind. A blue notebook, an old portrait, a sketchbook, and a box of photographs without names draw him deeper into the complicated history of stolen art and the families separated from it. What begins as an unwanted assignment becomes an investigation into provenance, memory, ownership, and the responsibility of ordinary people to notice what history has allowed to disappear.

Moving between wartime Paris and twenty-first-century Utah, The Young Docent is a dual-timeline young adult historical mystery about Nazi-looted art, restitution, and the people who refuse to let names vanish from the record. As Eli learns, objects carry people. A painting is never only a painting, a photograph is never only paper, and an inventory can be used either to erase a life or preserve it. Sometimes history survives because someone powerful saves it. And sometimes it survives because one person decides to write down a name.