Nonna’s Book of Mysteries

By Mary Osborne

What if someone told you, “You can’t, you’re a girl”?

At a time when young women are more likely than young men to graduate from college and women comprise half the workforce, Mary Osborne encourages teenage girls to join the trend and reach for the stars. Like the heroine of her teen novel, today’s young women are trailblazers, aspiring to jobs once dominated by men and actively seeking tools of personal empowerment.

The ambition to achieve outside the home and to balance work, family, and spiritual life are central themes in Osborne’s historical. Though painters’ apprenticeships for young women do not exist in the Florence of Renaissance Italy, fourteen-year-old Emilia Serafini dreams of becoming a painter. With the odds stacked against her, Emilia receives a book that belonged to her grandmother—A Manual to the Science of Alchemy. The book is filled with intriguing knowledge, and Emilia finds herself turning to it again and again.

Drawing on the mystical world of alchemy, Mary Osborne infuses her story with ancient wisdom as she paints the fascinating portrait of a young woman who defies convention to seek her destiny.

Grand Prize Winner of the Paris Book Festival

Chicago Sun-Times Summer Reading Guide Selection

Best Teen Book 2010 San Francisco Book Festival

I loved Nonna’s Book of Mysteries! It’s is a wonder of a book—exciting, mysterious, and wise.  I’ll long remember the courageous and determined Emilia who learns about choices and the consequences of choices, about the importance of struggle and perseverance, about loyalty, friendship, and love, amid the splendors of Renaissance Florence.  I can’t wait for another from Mary Osborne.

—Karen Cushman, Newberry Award winner, author of the Midwife’s Apprentice

For more information on Mary Osborne visit her page: CLICK HERE

Mary Osborne, author of Nonna's Book of Mysteries