The book's other trick, deftly revealed by Smith 20 or so pages into each half, is that both characters are in fact female. Francescho, whose artistic talents become obvious in early childhood, is grieving for her dead mother, wearing her too-big clothes and hiding in a trunk, when her father persuades her to dress as a boy so that she can be apprenticed to a painter. (The alternative is living out the rest of her days in a nunnery, painting religious scenes no one will ever see.) When first "shot back into being like an arrow" into a gallery where George is staring at one of her paintings, Francescho assumes that George, a slender figure in jeans, is male. But Georgia, her real name, is a bereft daughter, mourning a mother recently dead of an allergic reaction to antibiotics. George (the name she goes by throughout) betrays no awareness of the presence accompanying her, but she becomes fixated on Francescho’s work as a way of staying close to her mother, who took her to see the del Cossa frescoes she loved in Italy shortly before she died. (Francesco—no "h"—del Cossa was a real artist whose work hangs in Europe as well as Washington's National Gallery of Art, although there’s no argument outside of this book that he may have been female.)

The parallels between the two characters, and the possibility that Francescho is either some sort of guardian angel or a spirit who’s unconsciously been summoned, could seem contrived. But Smith’s deliberate obfuscation of what, exactly, is going on makes the novel feel less mawkish and more metaphysical. It’s like a mystery to be marveled at rather than solved. Her writing is crisp and elegant throughout, elevating Francescho’s anachronistic observances of 21st-century life from predictably comic to poetic. "Look boy," she tries to tell an unobservant George, "cheerful thing: spring flowers in a sort of bucket hanging off the top of a metal pole stuck in the side of the roadway." A nearby blackbird's beak is "a good Naples yellow," and around George's eyes is "the blackness of sadness (burnt peach stone smudged in the curve of the bone at both sides)." The iPad George uses to snap pictures and watch pornographic videos, meanwhile, is assumed to be "a holy votive tablet" through which she witnesses "frieze after frieze of lifelike scenes of carnal pleasure-house love enacted before our eyes."

Where Francescho is arrogant and bold and fearless, George is numb, occasionally caustic, and often tender, like a bruise under the skin. "How can it be that there's an advert on TV with dancing bananas unpeeling themselves in it and teabags doing a dance, and her mother will never see that advert?” she wonders as she sits in front of the screen. “How can the world be this vulgar?" George watches pornography, it becomes clear, not for enjoyment, but because she's haunted by one particular video of a dazed, very young girl and an older man. She promises herself that she will watch it each day "to remind herself not to forget the thing that happened to this person," as if by paying tribute to one neglected soul she can excise some of her own pain. Artistic tendencies emerge as she creates murals in her bedroom. The memory lingers of her trip with her mother to the Palazza Schifanoia: There she was struck by how the bright blue of the sky in one of the frescoes—del Cossa’s, of course—"gives you a breather from the things happening above and below it," and by how a figure strangling a duck is "an amazing way to show how ordinary cruelty really is."