Clara and Hailey are identical twins living in "entertainment-forsaken Bear Pass," contemplating questions typical of most 17-year-olds, with one significant difference: the girls are conjoined, connected at their midpoint ("or butt-to-butt, if you want to get all technical about it," says Clara).
Their parents have spent the girls' entire lives working to convince the twins that they're normal, even moving to a small California community to keep them in a supportive bubble. But as their friends start making plans for college, Clara and Hailey grapple with a concept they haven't thus far been free to consider, thanks to their mother's passionate feelings about the wrongness of separating healthy conjoined twins: Could they be separated? Should they? And also, what about boys? Clara, who is an aspiring astronomer, says, "[A]t some point I started worrying about Gemini, the celestial twins. Were they glad to spend billions of years together in the sky, always on display, or would they rather wander apart and explore?"
Just as they must do in almost every aspect of their lives, pink-haired, tattooed artist Hailey and introverted Clara take turns narrating chapters in Sonya Mukherjee's compelling first novel. Whether they're confronting their well-meaning parents, bickering with each other or flirting with their crushes, Clara and Hailey are unusual yet familiar and appealing protagonists. Readers--just like their friends--will move rapidly beyond voyeuristic curiosity to empathy and genuine liking for the girls. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor