I read this book a few weeks ago and it blew me away. I
always read a lot of Young Adult books because, hello – YA! It’s young, it’s
fun, it’s emotional, it’s just great. I find myself preferring to read adult
suspense, memoirs, or YA. That’s pretty much it. But that means I sometimes get
in a rut… Some YA books have very similar plots, or characters, or you just
don’t connect with it in some way, and you burn out.
Sometimes.
But not this time.
This book was so unique and so beautiful and so
breathtaking. It was excruciating to put it down to tend to my child. I wanted
to burrow down into this book’s world and stay there, and I still feel that
way.
Hailey and Clara are conjoined twins. They are seventeen,
about to graduate high school, and dreaming about the future. Their mother
wants them to live at home and go to the nearby college, but Hailey wants to go
to art school. Clara doesn’t mind staying close to home, because her head is
always in the stars. If she could go anywhere, it would be into space to look
down at the Earth and really put everything in perspective.
When a new guy moves to the twins’ small town, everyone at
the high school is intrigued. They are a close-knit community, and everyone
knows everyone. Everyone is used to Hailey and Clara, so someone new to adjust
to makes Clara nervous. Hailey is excited, because she loves to stand out with
her pink hair and in-your-face attitude. Max, the new guy, loves astronomy, and
Clara starts to crush on him. She and Hailey have never dated, never thought boys
would be interested in them. But the Sadie Hawkins dance is on the horizon, and
Hailey wants to go.
I loved that this book deals with “typical” teenager topics
like crushes and dating, but it had a fascinating skew with the conjoined twins
angle. I read
an
adult novel about conjoined twins years ago, and it was awful, so I love
that this book is interesting and exciting and will grab readers and make them
think about people who are different.
