How to Be Both

“Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.”

Very similar in tone and style to previous Ali Smith books I've read - which is certainly not a negative. I preferred the George section due to the more conventional tone. However, I think the Francesco part had more depth, and reads as a kind of gender-fluid/trans allegory.

What I took away from this book is that The past, the present and the future are not linear, not the way we understand it, anyway. 

The premise of this book got me interested. 2 stories: 1 a renaissance artist in the 1460s, 1 a girl in Cambridge in the 2010s, half of printed copies got the Eye (artist) story first, the other half got the Camera (girl) story first. This is not a gimmick. The book is excellent, it doesn't need a gimmick.

The copy I read has the Camera first and I think it really made a difference in how I perceived the story. Yes, in spite of there being 2 stories, it is interlinked and really just one story. There is such a difference in writing style that it took me a while to adjust when I switched to the Eye, so much so I needed a day or so complete break to let the Camera settle. And now having read the entire thing, I'm going to spend a bit of time dipping …

A book about grief, and history, and art, and how art heals...While the book is not without flaws (in my view the George section is definitely the better one), it is so smart and so insightful that they seem insignificant. The characters of George and her mom are superb, and using a 15th century painting as a foundation around which George processes her grief over her mother's death is both brilliant and consistent with the author's wish to create a book layered like a fresco.

Experimental freestyle poetry at first; don't get discouraged. It's well worth it. Cleverer, smarter, and more poignant every time I turned a page.