Twists and Turns in THE TWIN'S DAUGHTER

My dad is an identical twin, so my family is full of twin tales.  One of these tales is of the first time I toddled into the room to find my father seated beside his brother.  I don’t remember the incident, but I’m told that my shock at seeing my father duplicated rocked my small world enough that I promptly burst into tears and fled the room.  It was only after much cajoling and explanation that I re-emerged, now aware of the fact that some people in the world have brothers or sisters who look exactly like them.  And that my dad, and my uncle, were two of those people.

So, as soon as thirteen-year-old Lucy Sexton opened the door of her home to find a woman on the doorstep who looked exactly like her mother, yet wore shabby clothes and appeared far dirtier and thinner than the mother Lucy remembered seeing off that morning, I was hooked on The Twin’s Daughter.  The entire novel plays off this initial moment, and the subsequent changes to Lucy’s life after the arrival of her Aunt Helen.  There are lots of small changes to that life, followed by one big one: Lucy comes home one day to find one twin murdered and the other bound to a chair.  Lucy feels relief—a guilty relief, but relief nonetheless—when the survivor turns out to be her mother.  But the mother who emerges from the attack is so changed…is she really the person she claims to be?

Lauren Baratz-Logsted’s novel twists and turns and twists again.  It’s set in Victorian London, and it’s got a gothic mystery edge.  It’s also got a sweet love story to soften the edges of the bloody murder and dark shadows, a love story complete with love letters and chess matches and secret tunnels.  Lucy’s love for Kit survives an initially awkward meeting, Kit’s time away at war, and Lucy’s occasional irrational jealous bouts.  So if you like a little romance mixed in with your mystery, The Twin’s Daughter won’t disappoint you in that area.  Lucy thinks of herself and Kit as “mates of the soul who had been born into the universe instinctively knowing of the other’s existence, only waiting for the moment of meeting” (334).

A murder-mystery, a romance, an historical novel…The Twin’s Daughter steps into every pair of shoes, and every pair fits comfortably.  It’s a story about identity and deception that forces the reader to ask how well we know the people around us and, possibly, how well we know ourselves.  Lucy thinks of how she is “the witness, the observer, and how it’s impossible for the observer ever to know everything about the other people in the story…some things will, by necessity, always remain a mystery” (388).  Baratz-Logsted knows how to keep the mystery spinning right up to the last page, and beyond.


[Baratz-Logsted.  The Twin's Daughter. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.]