The Twins
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
They were inseparable until an innocent mistake tore them apart.
Growing up, Viola and Issy clung to each other in the wake of their mother's eccentricity, as she dragged them from a commune to a tiny Welsh village. They thought the three of them would be together forever.
But an innocent mistake one summer set them on drastically different paths. Now in their twenties, Issy is trying to hold together a life as a magazine art director, while Viola is slowly destroying herself, consumed with guilt over the events they unknowingly set into motion as children.
When it seems that Viola might never recover, Issy returns to the town they haven't seen in a decade, to face her own demons and see what answers, if any, she can find.
A deeply moving, gripping debut, this is a novel about the secrets we carry, and the bonds between twins.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sarginson's promising, if uneven, debut novel explores the deep, sometimes perilous bond between twins. Viola wastes away in a hospital bed due to an eating disorder. Her twin, Isolte, works hard to succeed in the magazine world. Both are haunted by their childhood, overseen by an unconventional mother who took them from a Welsh commune to the forests of Suffolk, England. There, they befriended another set of twins, John and Michael, sharing a secret that destroyed the girls' mother and went on to consume all their lives. The emotional geography of the forests is magical, evoking a dark, fairy-tale feel. The twins are competitive and clamor for attention, while simultaneously demanding closeness and separation; their relationship is beautifully done, but Sarginson's use of the present tense (possible evidence of her background as a script editor) is wildly distracting. Viola's anorexia goes underexplored, and the repeated acts of animal cruelty depicted in the novel leave a bitter aftertaste, as does the portrayal of the twins' mother as yet another unconventional woman punished in literature for nonconformity. The novel stops at a turning point, leaving the reader to wonder if a sequel is in the works, or if the author is trying to show that life is inconclusive.
