Both girls have big problems. Maria, from her earliest years, is always asking, "What are you like?" and looking into mirrors. Sometimes violent in arguments, she sleeps around, gets stoned, attempts suicide, and suffers a nervous breakdown. She believes she "does not have a talent for life." Rose is a sadist who taunts the foster children her parents take in, goading one boy into throwing a kitten through a window and later trying to drown him. She believes there is "a hole in her head, a hole in her life." (Perhaps it is that hole she is trying to fill when she goes on her shoplifting expeditions.) Neither girl seems to have profited in any way from "nurture"--only nature counts here, and finding your twin, even when you don't know you are a twin, is so compelling an urge that it overwhelms any attempt to live a normal life.

With her very staccato style of short sentences, most having the subject at the beginning, Enright machine-guns her story at the reader. Her in-the-face style is emphatic and unrelenting as her narrative jumps from 1965 to 1985 to 1971, etc., from Dublin to New York to London, and from Maria to Rose and, eventually, to Anna, their mother. The story is sometimes difficult to follow, as the connections which explain some of the episodes do not occur until later in the book. Tellingly, Enright has to rely on several extreme coincidences to bring the strands of her story together and achieve some sort of resolution. The plot, such as it is, strains credulity, and if you don't agree with her thesis regarding the inborn compulsion of twins to find each other, even when they don't know they are twins, you will find this book difficult to accept. Mary Whipple

Not much dialogue to liven things up with - just page after page of self conscious prose. I was disappointed as the book cover looked really intersting. Perhaps it was just me - maybe I didn't get it.