I hesitated to purchase this book from amazon-marketplace because the reviews were mostly critical.
Characters not believably described, exaggerated story line, abrupt shift of perspective - the mostly juvenile readers didn't seem to buy into this story. I still bought it and I do not regret it.
Most of the reviews seem to think the book starts with a hoax 16yo old Missy plays on her friends and schoolmates pretending she found her long lost identical twin in her cousin Claire.
It doesn't. It starts with Missy listening to the radio and hearing something about twins who are much different in size and weight at birth might catch up in later life. It triggers something in her perception of herself and her cousin Claire with whom she has a very close relationship. When her adventurously minded biology teacher, goaded to talk about hoaxes in class by the students, sets them the task to create a hoax themselves, Missy really uses the opportunity to spill the beans on a family secret she hardly knows exists.
Cooney's style poses a challenge to her young readers. It seems to be abrupt, chaotic in parts, changing perspective too fast, dropping info and then leaving the scene, but as an adult reader I think she just keeps closer to reality than to the traditional idea of a story line. In reality stories seldom have lines but knotted wads and the author in this book doesn't do the steady unraveling the reader expects, but just throws them the wad to do the unraveling themselves.
There is Missy getting a senior student in charge of the school tv to distribute her alleged meeting with her alleged twin to the whole school and - unplanned by her but totally in line with modern kids' thinking - via YouTube to the rest of the world.
There is Claire, her cousin - as the girls have believed all their lives - having "a strong family resemblance", unwilling to participate in the 'hoax' but playing along after all and becoming unexpectedly overwhelmed by the girls' eery similarity shown on screen.
There are the Vianellos, Missy's parents, and the Linnehads, Claire's, with their different life-styles and challenges.
There are friends and peers who are shocked and amazed at the alleged twin-reunion.
And then there is Genevieve. Another girl with another set of parents. Or is she?
The social and emotional effects of identical triplets separated at birth and finding out at age 16, as well as the situation of families with very different finacial means on the eve of College for their daughters, of a young and ambitious couple facing an unwanted pregnancy and two other couples not able to become pregnant and eager not to ask too many questions when offered an opportunity to adopt a baby, the very different personalities of three girls wo look exactly alike and the difficulties to travel from one place to another within a range of 20 miles but with three different states involved... the book in parts resembles an impressionistic-pointillistic painting. The author just puts down dots which seem unrelated at first and slowly develop into the whole picture.
Although no twin dies in this book, the experience of twinloss is described very vividly and convincingly. Cooney obviously did her homework on this subject. The closeness between the "cousins" Missy and Claire is a bit spooky to their parents long before Missy's "hoax" discloses their twinship. They not only text one another all day long, they express a need to hear the other one's voice and meet regularly that goes beyond the expected level. The same goes for the only half-consciously perceived longing for something/someone Missy experiences and which, mysteriously, isn't satisfied even by meeting with Claire every weekend. The way the triplets react to one another when they finally meet is also described empathically and convincingly.
By the way, the different possibilities for a triplet pregnancy to develop are described correctly in this book. Sadly, this is not a given for every fictional book about multiples
At the end of the day, as an adult reader, I'd have to tell the young critics of the book they simply didn't understand its expert grasp of the plot. Caroline B. Cooney did a very good job with this book and even if it spares the reader the pain of the ultimate twinloss and leaves the door open for a very optimistic future for all characters, it's worth a read for twinless twins imhO, maybe specially early loss twins, because it faces the feelings of multiples separated at birth and living their twinship unconsciously for a long time, in a convincing way.
Sunday, December 16, 2018
Books on Twinloss N° 14 "The One Left Behind" by Willo Davis Roberts
This small book is one of my favourites. In no more than 140 pages we learn how the loss of a twin differently affects a family and the surviving twin. Acclaimed writer Willo Davis Roberts (1949-2004) introduces the reader to the Sebold family, five boys in different stages of teenage and young adult, schizophrenic uncle Frank (quite a dear) and 11-year old Mandy whose identical twin sister Angel died one year ago.
The family is close but, as it turns out, not close enough to notice that in the general hubbubb of planning a weekend with the parents gone to celebrate their 24th wedding anniversary, Mandy gets left behind at home on her own.
Mandy is left alone in more than one sense. Her family, although grieving for her sister Angel after she died from accidental food poisoning, has moved on. Her brother Bert is newly married, the other brothers have sports and peers and girls to fill their lives. Mandy is drifting through an everyday life that no longer feels like hers and the others don't seem to notice. And now she is left behind when everybody rushes away for the weekend.
Willo Davis Roberts perfectly captures the situation of the young surviving twin in the lines "It occurred to her now, in the middle of the night in the huge silent house, that even if the entire family had been home, she would still be alone. She could not reach out and touch any of them, nor would it mean anything if she could." (p.4)
I sometimes think no more words are needed to describe the feelings of a twinless twin.
But, of course, the book uses some more words, and so we learn about the relationship between Angel and Mandy. How Angel had always been "the best and the smartest and the prettiest" (p.13), the daring one, the one to intiate social contact, and how Mandy realises she is lost without her sister. Their make-believe games played in the coastal area they live in, involving rather risky trips to the beach and deserted lighthouses, for instance, were the twins' favourite past time, and Mandy tries to carry them on on her own. She knows Angel so well she is able to provide her parts as well as her own. The make-believe turns into the life line the little girl unconsciously uses to survive the unsurvivable: the loss of her twin.
And then suspense is added. Willo Davis Roberts was known to write stories full of suspense, mysterious figures and crime and "The One Left Behind" is no exception. First there are noises in the house, empty but for Mandy and the giant family dog, Herry. Then there are foot prints in the sand and a wrecked car in the undergrowth. Mandy knows Angel would not have left any of these things unexplored, and neither does she.
The story of Xander, the boy who kidnapped his little brother from a devious baby-sitter and went to hide at his great-grandmother's beach house not knowing she passed away some time ago, interweaves with Mandy's left-behindness. It's Angel's presence, her sense of still being a twin, that allows Mandy to deal with the situation, make decisions and in the end bring a highly dangerous situation to a good end.
Of course, big dog Herry and her mother's schizophrenic brother Frank also play a part in this, together with the local police officer Clancy who never before had such a crime at his hands. He quite rises to the occasion.
The setting, all in all, is a close-knitted community where people, even the weird ones, look out for one another, and that makes the book thoroughly endearing. The largely unnoticed loneliness of the twinless twin runs like an undercurrent through the story, and is brought to an end satisfactiory for the reader in the concluding lines from Mandy's thoughts that "she was pretty sure that from now on, even all by herself, she would be able to lean on what Angel would have thought or said. Because she knew Angel that well. Nobody would ever be able to change that." (p.138)
It's a childrens book, after all, and the pain and loneliness have to morph into something hopeful for the future, but it's also a book for twinless twins of all ages to spend an hour or two on and savour some lines which really hit the nail on the head. I like to come back to it again and again.
The family is close but, as it turns out, not close enough to notice that in the general hubbubb of planning a weekend with the parents gone to celebrate their 24th wedding anniversary, Mandy gets left behind at home on her own.
Mandy is left alone in more than one sense. Her family, although grieving for her sister Angel after she died from accidental food poisoning, has moved on. Her brother Bert is newly married, the other brothers have sports and peers and girls to fill their lives. Mandy is drifting through an everyday life that no longer feels like hers and the others don't seem to notice. And now she is left behind when everybody rushes away for the weekend.
Willo Davis Roberts perfectly captures the situation of the young surviving twin in the lines "It occurred to her now, in the middle of the night in the huge silent house, that even if the entire family had been home, she would still be alone. She could not reach out and touch any of them, nor would it mean anything if she could." (p.4)
I sometimes think no more words are needed to describe the feelings of a twinless twin.
But, of course, the book uses some more words, and so we learn about the relationship between Angel and Mandy. How Angel had always been "the best and the smartest and the prettiest" (p.13), the daring one, the one to intiate social contact, and how Mandy realises she is lost without her sister. Their make-believe games played in the coastal area they live in, involving rather risky trips to the beach and deserted lighthouses, for instance, were the twins' favourite past time, and Mandy tries to carry them on on her own. She knows Angel so well she is able to provide her parts as well as her own. The make-believe turns into the life line the little girl unconsciously uses to survive the unsurvivable: the loss of her twin.
And then suspense is added. Willo Davis Roberts was known to write stories full of suspense, mysterious figures and crime and "The One Left Behind" is no exception. First there are noises in the house, empty but for Mandy and the giant family dog, Herry. Then there are foot prints in the sand and a wrecked car in the undergrowth. Mandy knows Angel would not have left any of these things unexplored, and neither does she.
The story of Xander, the boy who kidnapped his little brother from a devious baby-sitter and went to hide at his great-grandmother's beach house not knowing she passed away some time ago, interweaves with Mandy's left-behindness. It's Angel's presence, her sense of still being a twin, that allows Mandy to deal with the situation, make decisions and in the end bring a highly dangerous situation to a good end.
Of course, big dog Herry and her mother's schizophrenic brother Frank also play a part in this, together with the local police officer Clancy who never before had such a crime at his hands. He quite rises to the occasion.
The setting, all in all, is a close-knitted community where people, even the weird ones, look out for one another, and that makes the book thoroughly endearing. The largely unnoticed loneliness of the twinless twin runs like an undercurrent through the story, and is brought to an end satisfactiory for the reader in the concluding lines from Mandy's thoughts that "she was pretty sure that from now on, even all by herself, she would be able to lean on what Angel would have thought or said. Because she knew Angel that well. Nobody would ever be able to change that." (p.138)
It's a childrens book, after all, and the pain and loneliness have to morph into something hopeful for the future, but it's also a book for twinless twins of all ages to spend an hour or two on and savour some lines which really hit the nail on the head. I like to come back to it again and again.
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