My Name Was Eden
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
For fans of The Push and The Undoing, an edge-of-your-seat thriller that peels back the layers of a family that's not as perfect as it seems.
“My Name Was Eden is a compulsive, didn't-see-it-coming thriller.”—Abigail Dean, international bestselling author of Girl A
One twin vanished. The other twin remained. Until now...
When her daughter Eden came home from the hospital, Lucy was profoundly relieved. Eden had survived a drowning incident and had no apparent brain damage, no serious injuries, not even a scratch on her. Lucy fervently welcomed having a second chance at being the good mother she should have been before her teenager’s accident.
Until Eden tells her that Eden isn’t her name. Until she starts calling herself Eli. The name Lucy had reserved for Eden’s unborn twin.
Don’t worry, says the doctor. Eden is completely fine, says her husband. Of course I’m fine, Eden says, with that strange new smile of hers. I didn’t die. I’m here.
But Lucy knows something’s very wrong with Eden. She’s not her maddening, complicated teenage girl anymore—this straight-backed, even tempered, steady-eyed child in her house is someone else entirely. Eden, it seems, is the twin who disappeared…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barker-White debuts with a flimsy domestic thriller about a British mother's unnerving experience with vanishing twin syndrome. Lucy Hamilton's life seems perfect: she lives in a large house on the outskirts of England's Lake District, where she dotes on her handsome, successful husband, James, and precocious 14-year-old daughter, Eden. Then tragedy strikes. After Eden nearly drowns in a small lake near the Hamiltons' home one afternoon, she loses consciousness and it's touch-and-go at the hospital as doctors attempt to revive her. When she finally wakes up, she tells the medical staff that her name is Eli—the same name Lucy chose for Eden's brother when she learned she was pregnant with fraternal twins. Due to a rare condition called vanishing twin syndrome, Eden absorbed Eli while both were still in Lucy's womb, but it now appears that the unborn boy has emerged from the depths of Eden's consciousness. Unlike his sister, he's less willing to keep family secrets and prone to violence. Chapters alternate between the perspectives of Lucy and a friend of Eden/Eli's, but Barker-White never quite utilizes the dueling viewpoints or Lucy's unsettling plight to ignite a properly nerve-shredding thriller, and the plot reversals are too obvious for things to take flight. This misses the mark.
