How to be both / Smith, Ali

Presents a two-in-one experimental novel about death, gender, morality, and art. In the first half of the book, a teen named Georgia struggles with the death of her mother, a feminist art critic obsessed with fifteenth-century Italian artist Francesco del Cossa. In the other half of the novel, the spirit of del Cossa observes twentieth-century Britain and remembers her own life disguised as a boy in order to practice her art.

"Intertwines the stories of a defiant Renaissance painter and a modern teenage girl ... two characters inhabit the spaces between categories. In one half of the book, we follow the story of Francescho del Cossa, a Renaissance painter in fifteenth-century Italy who assumes a dual identity, living as both a man and a woman. In the novel's other half, George, a contemporary English teenage girl, is in mourning after the death of her brilliant, rebellious mother. As she struggles to fill the void in her life, George finds her thoughts circling again and again around a whimsical trip she and her mother once made to Italy, to see a certain Renaissance fresco."--Provided by publisher.