Library Limelights 258

 

Claire Douglas. The Sisters. UK: HarperCollins Publishers, 2015.

Abi Cavendish is a freelance journalist who blames herself for the death of her beloved identical twin sister Lucy in a car crash when Abi was driving. Since then she’s attracted to people who resemble Lucy. Such as Beatrice Price, who also happens to be an identical twin to brother Ben. Before you know it, Abi has moved into the Prices’ expansive home that boards up-and-coming artists. She’s also dazzled by Ben. Her neediness and conflicting feelings for each finally settle on Ben as the prime object of her affection, and he reciprocates. Yet an odd tension is apparent between the twins, with murky hints about their past. Beatrice’s friendliness toward Abi waxes and wanes from day to day. More murkiness about how Abi has handled grief and guilt over Lucy. A great deal of time is spent lounging around in tea-dresses, each woman examining her conflicting feelings about the other, and about Ben, without revealing much of interest or suspense, emotions all over the map.

If the characters were more than superficial, one might understand whatever inspired mad love between the waif Abi and shallow Ben who look like twins themselves. Talk about a slow buildup. Midway, a bit of speed picks up. Someone is trying to sabotage Abi. Or drive her away. Or is she imagining small thefts and slights? Ben’s attitude toward her becomes inconsistent. Old friends and her shrink try to help her resolve the loss of Lucy. And so on, personalities like yoyos, until a deus ex machina tears away some camouflage. Mainly narrated by Abi but Beatrice gets third-person innings too. Yours truly ploughed on through the psychological fuzz. The basic premise of three or four (with references to Lucy) look-alike people getting obsessed with each other is barely credible. Enough of tiresome twins!

Abi

▪ It’s been nearly a year since I ended up in that place ‒ I still can’t bear to think of it – but they still believe I’m unstable, psychologically weak, that I shouldn’t be left on my own for too long. (7)

▪ “Are you Beatrice’s sister? You’re like two peas in a pod.” (16)

▪ Of course, there is nothing I’d want more than to move in with her, to be with her all the time. (37)

▪ I feel a stab of hurt that they would go off and play tennis without asking me. (88)

▪ I don’t know how to live without you, Lucy. I don’t know how to be me, without you. (133)

▪ “And you didn’t think to tell her that I specifically told you that I didn’t want a fucking party?” I snarl. I carefully enunciate each word to make my point. (212)

▪ “I don’t think it’s safe for you to stay here, Abi. You need to move out.” (231)

▪ We lived in a cocoon ‒ me and him in that trust-funded Georgian house with his twin sister and her weird friends. We weren’t living in the real world at all. (296)

Beatrice

▪ She has to do whatever she can to ensure that this time Ben doesn’t stand in her way. (27)

▪ “I had to leave Exeter, I couldn’t be anywhere near him afterwards, it was too painful to see him.” (106)

▪ Over a decade since her heart was not just broken but crushed, so why can’t she get over it? (110)

▪ “Do you think we should be honest with her? About the past? About what we did?” (113)

▪ “I think she’s fucking dangerous. I want her out of this house.” (233)

▪ “Are you sure about this, Ben?” she says softly, not looking in my direction. “Does Abi make you happy?” (264)

Ben

▪ Ben gapes at her as if he doesn’t know who she is, his face turning crimson. “You’re fucking joking,” he splutters. “We said we would never tell anyone, ever.” (113)

“We’ve done something awful, Bea,” he says in a low voice. “Abi would never look at me in the same way again. Or you.” (113)

▪ “You were right when you warned me that she’s damaged,” he says eventually. “I didn’t understand how much. I do now.” (215)

▪ “She thinks I went to Scotland for work. I can’t tell her, Bea, you know that.” (252)

Slow learner Abi?

I process Ben’s full sensual mouth, his freckles scattered across the bridge of his straight nose. They belong to him but they are part of Beatrice’s beautiful face too and it suddenly occurs to me, in that moment, that some of Ben’s attraction is that he’s her brother, her twin. He’s the male version of her. (59) [Well, DUH]

Abi’s pity party

The room swims and, with a sickening thud of clarity, I’m aware that I can’t trust my oldest friend. That I’m forever going to be tied with the mental illness tag, that I’m never going to be believed because Abi’s a sandwich short of a picnic, she’s been in a mental facility, didn’t you know? How can you believe anything she says? She’s paranoid, delusional. It’s as if I’m in a nightmare, where I’m trying to explain myself, trying to tell everyone that I’m perfectly sane, that it was a stupid mistake, a one-off, I’m not dangerous, I’m not a nutter, but no sound comes out of my mouth. (225)

Didn’t work out

I will miss this house, I think. Because for a while I was happy here, for a while the house held within its walls the promise of a life I was desperate to be part of. A life that was so different, so much more glamorous than the one I had been trying to escape from. (265)

Mom to Abi

I remember the words Mum said to me in the hospital after my failed suicide attempt, when I asked her how she could bear to carry on living without her other daughter. And through her tears she said, “Because Lucy lives on through you, Abi. When I look at you, I also see her. When I hear your voice, I also hear hers. So she can never be truly gone, don’t you see? If you die, my sweetheart, then there is nothing left of her in this world.” (301-2)

Elisabeth deMariaffi. The Retreat. Ebook download from TPL. USA: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2021.

What looked to be a dancer’s time out for recharging, among fellow artistes, turned out to be a breathless (wo)manhunt in elemental surroundings. Maeve came to the isolated, off-season High Water Center for the Arts expecting to recondition herself as director/choreographer of her own dance company. Arriving late at night in the snow, she finds the atmosphere a bit off somehow, starting with Sadie, the director’s assistant; she is shown her bedroom in the center and the studio cabin where she can work. Director Karolina is welcoming; facilities manager Dan is withdrawn. The other guests have been here before—Justin, a photojournalist; Anna, a filmmaker, becoming an immediate friend; Sim, who is preparing an enormous art installation that he keeps locked up. They’ve all been duly warned about unpredictable wildlife and weather in the mountains; it scarcely stops snowing.

Although Maeve is happy with her studio and her first workouts, she can’t shake a sense of foreboding: a shadowy, insubstantial presence. Maybe it’s a hangover from her recent split with ex-husband Iain, formerly artistic director of Nouvelle Vague dance company, where he tightly controlled her career and abused her at home. Or maybe it’s just the puzzling interplay among the others that she doesn’t understand. She allows herself a one-night stand with Sim, suspecting Anna and Dan are doing the same. But in fairly short order, their power goes out thanks to a nearby avalanche in the storm. Then the real fear begins on several levels, with the author constructing suspense and spookiness perfectly. But the nerve-wracking chase back and forth on mountain terrain refers to natural features—the tree line, the outcrop, the ledge, the lair, the rock face, the variety of trails―making it very difficult to visualize important pauses along the route. More to the point, motivation for the deaths never becomes clear. A little reminiscent of Jack Nicholson and the Overlook Hotel!

Bits

▪ Her star rose too quickly at Nouvelle Vague, and then of course Iain wanted her for himself. (60)

▪ “Your body, your decision, your time in the mountains.” (66)

▪ What Dan does with Anna is no business of Sadie’s. (86)

▪ She can still picture Sadie, crouched low, watching. (87)

▪ She tries repeating a silent mantra: This is not an emergency, just a short-term situation. (99)

▪ “I want the whole group together. What part of that do you not understand?” (106)

▪ “Jokes aside,” he says, “this is an artist’s dream. Avalanche isolation. No possible contact from the dirty world.” (112)

▪ “It’s the goddamn emergency radio,” Sim says under his breath. “What do you mean it doesn’t work in the cold?” (135)

▪ Then she hears something behind her and turns to see it’s Sadie—rigid with fear, alone and weeping. Finally showing her youth. (164)

▪ Two bad accidents in a matter of months? If it’s not negligent, then it’s sinister. (173)

▪ No one would step out into the snow in bare feet. No one. Not in this weather. Not on purpose. (188)

▪ By now the others will have reached the village, Maeve thinks. If the village is still there. (212)

▪ Maeve stumbles back, out of the freezer. She can feel her breath coming faster, too fast, and she pitches forward and vomits on the ground. (254)

▪ The wind comes up and it’s suddenly no different than her dream—the howl of it, the snow, all just the same. Only a crazy person would follow her through this. (286)

▪ She’s going to lead him to the bear. (288)

Megan Abbott. The Turnout. USA: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021.

Ah. Dancers, again, but this time the author knows every crook and cranny of the ballet world. Dara and Marie Durant, and Dara’s husband Charlie, operate the well-respected Durant School of Dance, established by their now deceased mother. They scarcely know any other life. A turnout is ultimate mastery of the hip joint, the key to perfect balletic form, likened by some to complete exposure ‒ surrender – of the body to a greedy audience. Charlie had also been a dancer, more or less adopted by Madame Durant, and grew up with the girls. An accumulation of injuries left him dependent on pain meds and physiotherapy. The three of them had become their own protective, unconventional family. As the crucial Nutcracker performance season approaches, a fire in one of their studios requires extensive renovation. Contractor Derek enters their world, soon causing imbalance in their lives of rigid scheduling. It’s clear to Dara that he has seduced Marie who revels in his rough attentions.

Derek’s seduction is more insidious than holding Marie in thrall; they are no longer a threesome at work and at home—everything Dara and Charlie have ever known. And while they deal with construction aggravation and contentious insurance claims, the pressure is on in a hundred ways among dance students and their pushy parents. Every little girl wants to be Clara, the star; Dara sees a faint parallel of her sister in Clara’s story. Dara tries to keep it all together up to The Nutcracker’s dress rehearsal, but they must get rid of Derek and his controlling slyness, as if violence always waits in the wings. Author Abbott has totally captured the environs, right down to the dust motes and scattered bobby pins of the studios, every lift and tilt of straining bodies, pain and tremble, and junior dozens of chattering pink- and black-clad bodies aiming for it. In this immensely atmospheric suspense, she’s also captured the deep unease a sinister stranger casts into preordained lives. Wow!

One-liners

▪ Someone had to keep up the tradition of rigor, of firm discipline, and it inevitably fell to Dara. (8)

▪ “Just remember,” she whispered, a quiver in her voice, “you’re the one who invited him in.” (47)

▪ One day, she told herself, Marie will learn to control herself. (89)

▪ “You three,” he said, his voice wet from sleep, “thick as thieves.” (140)

▪ “You know, when I first got here, I couldn’t tell. Is Charlie your husband,” he said, tossing his cup in the trash, “or your brother?” (140)

Multi-liners

▪ Marie always seemed ready to bolt, but never for long and never far. How far could one get if one still struggled to remember a bank card pin number, and left gas burners lit wherever she went. (10)

▪ Marie, the marks on Marie. On her neck this time, and fresh. They were violet and obscene. (94)

▪ The house was nothing to a man like Derek. The land was everything. (114)

▪ He’s like a mesmer, Dara thought. It’s like mind control. (177)

▪ “I told him things,” Marie blurted. “And he ... twisted them. I told him things he couldn’t understand.” (240)

▪ “I wish I could burn it down,” Mrs. Bloom said. “I wish I could burn the whole place down.” (281)

Marie

Marie didn’t like to think about things. Business decisions, all decisions, hung like a weight around her neck.

Marie didn’t like to sign papers, to put her name on things, to have too many keys.

Marie, who had so few attachments, obligations, connections that sometimes she felt like she was going to float away, ascend. But Dara could never tell if this was what she wanted, or her greatest fear. (44)

Charlie

She couldn’t tell what Charlie was thinking. She couldn’t tell how he felt. His eyes were cool blue and empty. It was how he’d always been as a dancer. All those years, all those bone spurs and labral tears, the stress fractures and torn tendons. Grinding his body to a fine powder. He didn’t let himself feel it, or anything. Or at least he never showed it.

You’re dancing yourself to death, his doctor said once, under his breath.

But Charlie wouldn’t stop. Until his body stopped for him. Until the hangman’s fracture that, surgery by surgery, forced him to stop dancing at all. (175)

Part of the body

The shoes, the shoes. The shoes were everything.

Pink satin fantasies from afar, from the audience, enthralled. But if you moved too close, you’d see that they’d already been battered, scored, disemboweled.

Those shoes, so intimate, soaked with your sweat until they sealed themselves to your feet, until, soon after, they fell to pieces.

Pink satin fantasies we beat into submission so they can be used and then discarded.

Pink satin fantasies created to give pleasure but destroyed in the process.

This, their mother said when she handed out Dara’s very first pointe shoe, is what we are. (238-9)

Home

No one wanted to face the truth. That every family was a hothouse, a swamp. Its own atmosphere, its own rules. Its own laws and gods. There would never be any understanding from the outside. There couldn’t be. (305)