The Girls by Lori Lansens – 368 pages
Book Blurb:
Rose and Ruby are twenty-nine-year-old conjoined twins.
Born during a tornado to a shocked teenage mother in the hospital at Leaford, Ontario, they are raised by the nurse who helped usher them into the world. Aunt Lovey and her husband, Uncle Stash, are middle-aged and with no children of their own. They relocate from the town to the drafty old farmhouse in the country that has been in Lovey’s family for generations.
Joined to Ruby at the head, Rose’s face is pulled to one side, but she has full use of her limbs. Ruby has a beautiful face, but her body is tiny and she is unable to walk.
She rests her legs on her sister’s hip, rather like a small child or a doll.
In spite of their situation, the girls lead surprisingly separate lives. Rose is bookish and a baseball fan. Ruby is fond of trash TV and has a passion for local history.
We learn of their early years as the town “freaks” and of Lovey’s and Stash’s determination to give them as normal an upbringing as possible.
But when we meet them, both Lovey and Stash are dead, the girls have moved back into town, and they’ve received some ominous news.
They are on the verge of becoming the oldest surviving craniopagus (joined at the head) twins in history, but the question of whether they’ll live to celebrate their thirtieth
birthday is suddenly impossible to answer.
My Review: 4 stars
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This novel reads like poetry and is ultimately a love story between sisters and their family. I was riveted to this story and these strong, likable women from the start. This book is a gentle reminder to count your blessing in whichever form they come in.
Both inspiring and intriguing, this book is a lullaby to the human condition.
Quotes I Liked:
I feel, holding books, accommodating their weight and breathing their dust, an abiding love. I trust them, in a way that I can’t trust my computer, though I couldn’t do without it. Books are matter. My books matter. What would I have done through these years without the library and all its lovely books?”
-“Write,’ she said, ‘as if you’ll never be read. That way you’ll be sure to tell the truth.”
-“I hum some secret place into being, thinking of this other me, the one that only I can see, a girl called She, who is not We, a girl who I will never be.”
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