Review: "Twins" by Caroline B. Cooney

Twins by Caroline B. Cooney
Published 1994
★★★

I was a huge Cooney fan as a pre-teen—I read every one of her books that I could get my bands on. This was one of my favourites, and I can't tell you how many times I reread it but it was many. I'm pretty sure that once upon a time when I played the Sims (that would be the Sims 1, back before the Sims had numbers) I had sims named Mary Lee and Madrigal.

The premise here, if you've never read the book: Mary Lee and Madrigal are identical twins, and their lives are completely entwined...until Mary Lee is sent, alone, to boarding school. She's devastated—and then she's devastated again when Madrigal comes to visit and Mary Lee realizes that Madrigal is thriving without her, and that perhaps it's not so much that they are reflections of each other as that Mary Lee is a reflection of Madrigal. And then, finally, she's devastated once more when she finds herself stepping into Madrigal's life...and realizes just what that life is.

For nostalgia factor, this gets nearly full stars. Cooney is brilliant at the little details; I still remember the way Mary Lee thinks about her hair, and the hair clip she bought once upon a time, and the way she talks about ski clothing:

Madrigal's ski outfit was stunning.

Jacket and pants looked as if they had begun life as a taffeta Christmas ball gown: darkly striking crimson and green, plaid with black velvet trim and black boots. Madrigal was no oddity, but a trendsetter. Every other girl on the slopes was now out of date.

Including Madrigal's twin.

For Mary Lee wore the same neon solids everyone else had that winter. Hers was turquoise. The color, which had seemed so splendid, which would hold its own against the lemon-yellow and hot-orange and lime-green of other skiers, was now pathetically out of style.

She was ashamed of her turquoise. She felt obvious. She felt loud and lacking in taste. (loc. 262)

Maybe it's just the nostalgia speaking, but I still feel that viscerally: how new and stylish the neon turquoise must have felt, and how immediately out-of-date it felt against Madrigal's Christmas taffeta.

Of course, there are some other things that don't really hold up. There's a whole plot point with the "bad part" of town, where apparently rats run rampant and the thought of being left alone there makes teenagers go mad. Cooney's books aren't exactly diverse to begin with (as far as I can remember nearly all of them feature thin, straight, well-off white girls with thin, straight, well-off white friends), and although the residents of this "bad part" of town aren't described, I don't think I'm wrong to be reading racial implications into the story. Separate from that, I question the way Mary Lee's parents handle things, including (spoiler alert!) having all of her things disposed of even though they know that it's Madrigal, not Mary Lee, who has died.

And: This time around I am left wondering about Madrigal, and wondering about the way things went down on the ski slopes. We're told what Madrigal intended...but how things go so terribly wrong for her? Makes me question whether there's supposed to be some level of redemption for her, as though at the end she couldn't go through with it. That's probably giving Madrigal too much credit, but I wonder.

Oh. Did I mention Madrigal's boyfriend? His name is Jon Pear. Never Jon, always John Pear. Do we think this is a play on the name Jean-Pierre? (But why?) I've concocted a whole long backstory about how the first time Cooney heard the name Jean-Pierre she thought that was the spelling, but of course that's just me cheerfully making things up.

At any rate, it did its nostalgia job. I'm glad so many books from my childhood have been digitized and are available at libraries again—makes it easier to go down certain kinds of memory lane.