Spider to the Fly

Spider to the Fly by James Markert, 352 pages

Ellie Isles was a regular suburban mom until a serial killer murdered a stranger who was identical to Ellie. Equally fascinated and horrified by the coincidence, Ellie started her own investigations into the killer known as the Spider, who left victims scattered alongside I-64, and wrote a bestselling true crime book about her experience. Four years later, the killer is still at large and more victims keep appearing, but Ellie has created an online following that's helping her get ahead of the Spider, and helping her remember some long-buried memories that may shed some light on the case.

The premise of this book is intriguing and it definitely is a wild ride. However, I found a lot of the final twists to be a bit over-the-top — it almost feels like two books smushed into one. Still, if you want a quick and terrifying thriller, give this one a go. Just don't hurt yourself rolling your eyes at the way-too-convenient conclusion. 

Blood on Her Tongue

Blood on Her Tongue by Johanna Van Veen, 368 pages

Lucy has always been close to her twin sister, Sarah, so when Sarah's husband informs her that Sarah is unwell, Lucy rushes to her side. Once she arrives, she finds that Sarah's much worse than Lucy thought — she's on the verge of death, starving but refusing to eat, and ranting like a madwoman. However, as she attends to her sister, Lucy learns that this mysterious disease seems to stem from around the same time that a body was found in one of the peat bogs at Sarah's estate, making Lucy curious about the bog body as well as its effects on her sister.

Van Veen is a native of the Netherlands, and she has found a fantastic setting for her gothic historical horror novels in her homeland. Much like her first book, My Darling Dreadful Thing, Van Veen uses the landscape to create an appropriately creepy atmosphere in Blood on Her Tongue. By marrying the supernatural horror associated with the bog body with the true-to-life dangers of being a headstrong woman (or worse, a lesbian) in the 1880s and throwing in some truly gruesome body horror, Van Veen has created an excellently creepy and twisty novel. Recommended for fans of Dracula and Shirley Jackson who don't mind a wee bit of cannibalism.

99 Percent Mine

99 Percent Mine by Sally Thorne (2019) 342 pages

Darcy's photography ambitions have been shelved indefinitely; now she spends her time working as a no-nonsense bartender. Her salary only pays for her health insurance, essential since she has had heart trouble for her whole life. She and her twin, Jamie, have inherited a cottage in poor condition from their grandmother, with the proviso that they have it renovated and sell it, splitting the proceeds. A quarrel has left them estranged. They've hired a longtime childhood friend, Tom, to renovate the house. The trouble is that Darcy has always had a crush on Tom, but snubbed him in order to travel the world, and when she came back, much later, he had a girlfriend. In order to assuage her unhappiness, Darcy has had some relationships, but never with anyone who merited permanence.

This novel serves as a dance between Darcy and Tom, as they spend time together handling the renovation, each figuring that the other is unavailable to them. There are a number of unrealistic details that just don't seem to fit properly, except to be more important later as the plot develops. How will all the connections between the characters work out? I had to suspend my disbelief, but in spite of that, mostly enjoyed the story.

Ms. Demeanor

 

Ms. Demeanor by Elinor Lipman (2023) 288 pages

Jane Morgan was a relatively new resident of her apartment building when she and a junior attorney from her firm decided one moonlit night to have sex on the rooftop of her building. A binoculars-wearing video-taping neighbor from a different building filmed them and called the police. The result: Jane's license to practice law is suspended and she is on home confinement for six months.

Jane's twin sister, a dermatologist, sends groceries. Jane loves to cook, and gets a couple of very old, late 1800s-era cookbooks that she is trying out. Her sister wants her to make cooking videos for TikTok. Meanwhile, the doorman to her building indicates that there is another person in the building who also has an ankle-monitor, as Jane does. Thus starts an interesting relationship – even though Perry is somewhat reserved, he and Jane find a kinship of sorts. He misses good meals and wants to pay her to cook for him a few nights per week.

Meanwhile, Jane learns that the woman who called the police on her has died, and there is a weird story behind her life and her death.

Elinor Lipman never disappoints me. Her characters are quirky and fun, in an understated way.

The God of Small Things

 The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, 321 pages.

This novel is very hard to describe. It is about twins Estha and Rahel, and dances between their lives in the present and the week their childhood was destroyed in the state of Kerala in the year 1969. It is a book about love and family, but in ways that are as often painful as beautiful, and it is hard to know what else to say about it without flattening the experience of reading it. 

It was an excellent book, and I definitely think people should experience it. Normally books that feel like they're built around one big event the author refuses to tell us tend to annoy me, because they tend to feel contrived and a little cheap, but this book is definitely an exception for me. I suspect it's because it feels less like the author is concealing from us the big terrible thing that happened and more like Estha and Rahel can't bear to think about it. The novel is graceful and engaging, and the prose is absolutely lovely (the phrase "a viable, dieable age" has been popping into my head at random for days now). I definitely plan on picking up another book by this author at some point.

High School

High School by Sara Quin & Tegan Quin, 369 pages

In 2019, the twin queens of Canadian indie rock, Tegan and Sara, published this memoir of their high school years. These were the years when they started learning to play music (by stealing their step-dad's guitar out of his office while he wasn't home and playing along to whatever grunge music they had playing at the time), write songs (many of which were spurred by their confused feelings about their best friends/girlfriends), and work together musically while fighting tooth and nail otherwise. 

This was a great book, and I can see why it's being adapted into a TV series for Amazon. It's relatable, captivating, and full of stories that are a bit more dramatic than anything I experienced in high school (of course, I was a band geek, so what do I know?). I highly recommend listening to the audiobook, which is read by the the twins (thankfully they announce their name before each chapter they read, as their voices are pretty similar) and is interspersed with low-fi recordings of their first songs. More than once, I found myself humming the songs, none of which I'd heard before, despite being a big fan of theirs. It also includes a short interview between Tegan and Sara about writing the book and recording the audiobook. A great book and an even better audiobook.

Middlegame

 Middlegame by Seanan McGuire, 492 pages.

Rodger and Dodger have had the ability to communicate psychically and see through each other's eyes since they were both seven-year-old geniuses on opposite sides of the country (in language and mathematics, respectively).  This is because they are in fact twins created by an evil alchemist as part of an attempt to take control of the natural laws of the universe. Over the course of their lives Rodger and Dodger are repeatedly pushed together and torn apart throughout their lives both by the machinations of others and their own (extremely fragile) hearts. 

McGuire's work is excellent as usual, although this book had less of an impact on me than many of her others. The prose is stunning and Rodger and Dodger are both very engaging, but some of the rules of this setting get more then a little complex. I'm also not the biggest fan of time loop stories, which put me at a bit of a disadvantage.

Fun Fact: The Up and Under books, which McGuire is writing under the pen name A. Deborah Baker, are a major plot point in this book. A. Deborah Baker herself is also a character, which I find delightfully immersive. 

The Black Tides of Heaven

The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Neon Yang, 237 pages

Twins Mokoya and Akeha are sold from their ruling mother to the Grand Monastery when they are born, destined for a studious life learning to manipulate the magical Slack that connects all elements in their world. But when Mokoya turns out to have the rare gift of prophecy, their mother claims them back, making Mokoya a key part of her brutal reign of power. As the twins reach adulthood, Akeha becomes fed up with their position in the background and heads out on their own, becoming aware of the conflict between the Protectorate and the Machinist faction, and eventually choosing sides.

This is a fantastic novella, with a well-developed creative world that immediately sucks the reader in. There are many things to consider even after the book has ended, and I look forward to discussing it with the Orcs & Aliens next week.

The Grammarians

The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine, 258 pages

As children, Laurel and Daphne are as close as twins can be — sharing everything from their identical red hair to a room to a secret language. They also share a deep love of words and grammar, something forged by their father at a young age when he brought home the massive Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language, second edition. This love of words carried them through college and into the "real world," where they still lived together and got jobs that utilized their grammatical skills. But then, their lives began to diverge as they got married and had families of their own, culminating in a years-long rift caused by the same dictionary that spawned their love of words. This is an interesting tale of sisterhood, of love, of language, of family. There's something that I can't quite relate to in the story, though I think it's because the bond between Laurel and Daphne is something that I simply can't grasp — and, not being a twin myself, I don't know that I'm supposed to. I'd recommend this to fans of the English language and dysfunctional family stories.

The Unhoneymooners

The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren, 400 pages

Olive Torres has never been as lucky as her charmed twin sister, Ami, who managed to finance her entire wedding and honeymoon by winning contests. But the twins' luck may be changing: maid of honor Olive and her nemesis, best man Ethan, are the only two people who manage to avoid getting sick from the (free) seafood buffet. In keeping with her thriftiness, Ami insists that Olive and the evil Ethan (who's the groom's brother, and thus has the same last name) take the (free) honeymoon trip to Maui.

Since this is a romance novel, it's obvious from the get-go that Olive and Ethan are going to fall for one another once they reach the tropical isle. And they do so through a series of awkward, steamy, hilarious, and sometimes heartfelt interludes. I loved this frothy and fun read, and I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a bit of an escape.

The Line

The Line (Witching Savannah Book #1) by J.D. Horn  296 pp.

Mercy Taylor is the granddaughter of the matriarch of a powerful family of witches in Savannah, Georgia. However, she is without powers of her own because they were inherited by her vastly powerful fraternal twin Maisie. After the murder of her grandmother, Ginny, a new anchor must be found for "The Line", a network of powerful witch families which keep an evil power from exerting control. Mercy is in an emotional quandary about her feelings for her sister's boyfriend and consults Mother Jilo, a Hoodoo/Root Doctor with a grudge against Ginny, to help fix this problem. A variety of familial intrigues are revealed and Maisie turns against Mercy, ostensibly because of the boyfriend issue. The twists in the last couple chapters were unexpected but left the plot open for the second book in the trilogy, The Source. In my opinion this could almost be a YA series. The violence and sex contained in it are not of the graphic sort and are used to move the plot along.

Middlegame

Middlegame by Seanan McGuire, 528 pages

More than a century ago, a gifted alchemist named Asphodel Baker became convinced that she had figured out the key to complete power and universal control — in effect, to becoming a god. Much like other women of her day, however, her efforts were largely ignored. So she created a tall, handsome alchemical man to carry on her work for her. Eighty years later, her creation, James Reed, is zeroing in on the idea of embodying universal opposing ideals in pairs of twins — Erin and Darren embody order and chaos, for example — though most have failed. But Roger and Dodger (embodiments of language and math, respectively) hold some promise, possibly because Reed adopted them out to families on opposite sides of the country. Middlegame follows this brother-sister pair as they find each other and learn about their true selves.

This is the first novel I've read by McGuire, whose Wayward Children series of novellas is one of my favorites of recent years. It's perhaps for that reason that I found this a bit uneven. I love the complicated relationship between the siblings, and I enjoyed the overall premise of the book. But it seems like a lot of the back-story was shoved into the last 100 or so pages, which left me feeling more than a bit confused until that point. So this one wasn't my favorite of McGuire's, but it definitely won't keep me from reading more of her books in the future.

Star of the North

Star of the North / D. B. John, Narrated by Linda Park, 402 pages

Years after her twin sister disappeared from a South Korean beach, Professor Jenna Williams gets word that she may have been part of a North Korean program to kidnap outsiders and learn their secrets. Originally not too excited about it, she quits her University job and goes into training with the CIA.  We also meet Colonel Cho in North Korea, he too is a twin who keeps learning even more disturbing things about the government he serves.  Mrs. Moon is a former prisoner, recently freed who is trying to make her way in North Korea.  The intersection of these main characters is interesting. Sometimes an action thriller, sometimes a more intimate story, this political story will keep you interested.

The Two of Us

The Two of Us by Andy Jones (2015) 326 pages

William Fisher and Ivy Lee had a love affair. They'd hardly known each other before everything changed with their pregnancy. The story, told from Fisher's point of view, follows the relationship from a mostly sexual one, to that of prospective parents of twins. Fisher's job producing television commercials isn't exactly fulfilling, but he's motivated to keep the money coming in, even if it's from selling toilet paper or tampons, to help prepare for his babies. He often wonders why Ivy had indicated that contraceptives weren't needed, but he can't bring himself to ask her about it; the timing is never right.

Preparing to parent together when one doesn't really know one's partner proves to be a challenge, a challenge made trickier when Ivy's bear of a brother comes to stay in their small flat for a time. Indeed, there's a whole cast of characters who are believable, and Fisher's point of view is spot-on, vacillating between his foibles and annoyances and his deeper, more thoughtful times.

The story is written by a Brit and set in England; the British terms are endearing.

Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty / Ramona Ausubel, 308 pp.

Ausubel's 2013 debut novel No One Is Here Except All of Us was fascinating and unlike anything else I'd read.  Sons and Daughters is startlingly pedestrian, the story of Fern and Edgar, two exceedingly rich parents who abruptly lose their fortune.  In the ensuing emotional chaos they temporarily abandon their children.  The sad troubles of the privileged are not exactly groundbreaking literary material, and the abandoned-children plot line mirrors (in part) Hector Tobar's terrific and superior The Barbarian Nurseries.

I still enjoy Ausubel's dreamy, fluid style and find sympathy with her characters.  But I was startled yet again, as in Chris Cleave's Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, to find rich white characters befriending two-dimensional black characters to make those rich white characters...more sympathetic?  Cool?  In 2016?

One Out of Two

One Out of Two by Daniel Sada, translated by Katherine Silver, 100 pages

Forty-something sisters Gloria and Constitucion Gamal are identical twins, with only an easily hidden birthmark distinguishing them. For their entire lives, they've embraced their similarity, wearing the same clothes, makeup and hairdo every day as they work together as tailors. But when a suitor emerges, they must determine the degree to which they are interchangeable.

While the story is intriguing, what makes this quirky short novel so fun and readable is how it's told. Sada presents the story as if he was telling it to a group of friends over a bottle or two of wine, and Silver does an excellent job of maintaining that feeling throughout. Through the telling, it's not easy to distinguish between the Gamal sisters, but that's kind of the point. It's a fun little story about sisterhood, and well worth the read.

The Crossover

The Crossover by Kwame Alexander, 240 pages
2015 Newbery Medal Winner
A 2015 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book
A 2015 Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults Book

 Josh and his twin brother, Jordan (better known as JB), are teen basketball phenoms. Basketball is as vital and natural to them as breathing, which isn't surprising given that their father played professionally overseas before deciding to retire at a young age. This year, their team has a real chance at winning the county championship, especially since Josh and JB are playing the best they've ever played. But growing up (and in the case of identical twins, starting to grow apart) takes its toll on the young boys. Josh feels left out when JB starts dating a new girl at their school, pushing down his anger until it explodes on the court. He also can't ignore the increasingly louder arguments between his parents over his father's health. Josh pours it all into poetry, telling the story in verse, while playing it out on the court. In fact, Kwame Alexander's decision to write The Crossover in verse format is a great one, infusing the scenes where Josh and JB are playing in games with a hip-hop swagger, playing with font sizes, styles, and spacing to create an image of the action. It adds to the vulnerability that Josh is feeling about JB and his father's not-totally-obvious decline in health. My only complaint is that it feels like a lot gets packed into a short amount of time and then ends before the reader has time to process all that happened (though after reveling in the 500-plus pages of All the Light We Cannot See, this feels like an unfair observation to make, so it's probably just me and not the book). This is a great book, perfect for middle-grade readers, and definitely worthy of its accolades.

(Read as part of YALSA's Hub Reading Challenge.)

The Lost Matriarch: Finding Leah in the Bible and Midrash / Jerry Rabow, 242 p.

Rabow takes a minutely close look at the Genesis figure of Leah, daughter of Laban, older sister of Rachel, wife of Jacob and mother of 7 of Jacob's children, including Judah, Levi, and Dinah.  This seemingly important woman receives scant textual treatment in Genesis itself; rather, it is in the midrash, the body of commentary on scripture which extends from early rabbinic writings to contemporary scholars, that brings Leah to life.

In the end, Rabow's book is as much about this midrashic process as about Leah herself.  This is not a criticism; I was grateful, after having read the word midrash many times, to see it in action, as it were.  Somewhat formulaic in presentation, but gracefully written and enlightening.

Cassandra at the wedding

Cassandra at the wedding / Dorothy Baker 241 pgs.

Cassandra and Judith are identical twins who have spent a lifetime avoiding dressing alike.  But they have also spent a lifetime together except for the last 9 months when Judith moved to New York and fell in love.  Now Judith is getting married and Cassandra has decided this will never do.  She thinks Judith should return to Berkeley and the apartment they shared. She is going home with one thought...STOP THE WEDDING.  Judith isn't all that surprised by Cassandra's plan.  Turns out Cassandra has always been a bit of a "pill" but Judith is a little surprised when Cassandra's plan B is to take a bunch of pills and off herself when the wedding prevention plan doesn't seem to be taking hold.  Lucky her new husband is a doctor and he manages to save Cassandra.  The interactions between the sisters is wonderful but the secondary characters, their granny, their father, the new husband, Cassandra's therapist, and their dead mother are all first rate as well. Sounds like a tragedy but it is more of a comedy.  Love this book and it makes me want to read the brilliant "The member of the wedding" by  Carson McCullers again.

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A Bride's Story vol. 5

A Bride's Story volume 5 by Kaoru Mori 198 pp.

Set in the regions of the nineteenth century Silk Road, the story continues with the wedding of the twins, Laila and Leily. As in the previous volumes, the artwork is beautifully detailed. The preparations for the wedding feast are shown in great detail as are the twins' wedding clothes. The twins are still independent and outspoken which adds humor to the tale. They are horrified to learn they must spend the wedding feast seated silently, under cover, away from the guests reveling at the celebration. Only when leaving their home for the reception with their husbands' family do they realize the seriousness of marriage. The ending chapters return to Amir (the original bride of the title) and her child-husband Karluk. There is much mention of the impending arrival of Russians warriors to the area leaving that story for the next volume.