Marcy Dermansky’s Twins: Reviewing Late

Heaven only knows why it took me three months to tell you what a fun, hilarious, and touching read Marcy Dermansky’s Twins is. It’s a young adult novel that you can read quickly and with great pleasure and one to give to any of your young reader friends.

Besides, maybe it can give some weight to my recommendation that I’m writing about this book a few months later and there are some things in it that I remember so vividly and with such pleasure. The opening conceit, in which the needier twin convinces her sister that they should celebrate their birthday with lower back tattoos--each will carry her sister’s name forever--is brilliant and immediately raises the stakes for their bond. The novel is all about that desire to brand your beloved forever and all the ways such bonds go awry even as they never go away.

I loved, too, the depiction, late in the book, of life at Hampshire College. The easy, happy, intellectual bohemianism--a carefree, careless atmosphere of sex and drugs and ideas--is perfectly rendered. I was--and am--a very uptight person, but oh! those weekends at Hampshire when I was in college. I used to take the Peter Pan bus from Boston out to the Happy Valley for forty-eight hours of play. Best was when my friend was dating the already dashing Liev Schreiber. I saw them in a production of “The Cherry Orchard” and then we went to a raucous cast party. Dermansky’s version doesn’t have Liev Schreiber, but it matches my memory perfectly.

And it is otherwise a heart-wrenching, wild and sweet story of sisterhood. I want it to be a movie right away.

So, of the books on my desk that I’ve read but haven’t told you about, there’s no excuse for the delay on this one. Grab it and enjoy.