- The Lost Twin
- Whispers in the Walls
- The Dance in the Dark
I’m ‘reviewing’ – honestly more a wholehearted recommendation than a review – the first half of this series together because my 8 year old daughter has been racing through them at such a pace that by the time I got organised to review The Lost Twin, she was already a couple of books further in. I’ve suggested taking a break between books to stretch the series out and she’s agreed to pause after number 3 and read something else before coming back to these. I hope it works out. The short break she tried to take after book 1 seemed to come with withdrawal symptoms – nothing else would satisfy her. Seeing it gave me a pang of nostalgia, and also a weird sense of achievement. I knew that feeling so well – feeling as though the characters in the book are more real than the people around you, a sense of disorientation, almost akin to jetlag, to have left one world and staggered back into another, for your senses to be giving you information that is clouded, indistinct, less vivid than the sights and sounds in your head. I know that feeling. And I’ve wanted her to know it too, even if it hurts sometimes, because it’s the joy and pain of being completely engrossed in a book.
Avoiding too many spoilers, The Lost Twin, the first in the series, is narrated by Ivy. Ivy has to pretend to be her identical twin sister, Scarlet, and go to Rookwood School for Girls, a boarding school that no one seems to want to be at, in order to find Scarlet, after Scarlet disappears, leaving behind fragments of her diary. My daughter has explained that there are some scary bits, lots of surprises and a creepy atmosphere. ‘It’s dark, in both senses of the word’, she says. ‘You’re not always sure if the characters are telling the truth’. What’s clear is that she is deeply invested in the twins achieving their goals.
We’ve been talking together about the books; what is it that captures her so completely? She says it’s because it feels ‘like you’re basically best friends with Scarlet and Ivy. Sometimes they’re keeping secrets and it feels like they trust you more than their sister.’ Which sounds like quite an endorsement to me.
You’ll see from the photo that we have the books in different editions. These are set somewhere in England, but I managed to get hold of the first through Bookshop.org in the USA; the others were a Christmas present and purchased in the UK, hence the different covers. The two covers naturally give different interpretations of the book. I find the strong colours and silhouettes on the UK edition very evocative, but my daughter spotted a detail on the US cover that she loves. The cover shows one sister with her back to a mirror. She’s holding a finger to her lips, but if you look carefully, her other hand, down by her side, is no longer a mirror image: she’s clasping hands with her twin through the mirror. What a gorgeous detail.
When I was a child, I had a silver pendant necklace of a tiny book that opened on a hinge, and inside was a bookworm, eating a hole in the book so the tip of its head poked through. I don’t know where it has got to, whether it made it to the USA when we moved years ago or not. But if I ever find it again, I have promised it to my daughter, next in a long line of bookworms.
P.S. What I’m reading. I did not finish Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt in time for my book group, but the discussion was so good, so rich and enthusiastic, that I have determined to finish it. For a book like that, concerned with love, motherhood, relationships, I don’t mind spoilers at all. Sometimes in fact I prefer them, because they make me more alert to all the nuances and the language along the way. However, I have done little reading this week, as I was encouraged by a friend to try the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. We were given our group assignments (a genre, a subject and a character) last Friday at midnight, and have to submit a story (max 2k words) by Saturday at midnight. I have a possible draft, so hopefully won’t be down to the wire on this one. And then patience, as the results of the first round aren’t until April. I have zero expectation of getting through the first round, but it’s been exciting to have criteria and a deadline and to make myself write something different.
Books for Our Children 