"Identical" by Ellen Hopkins

565 pages

Kaeleigh and Raeanne are 16-year-old identical twins. On the outside, everything in their lives appears to be perfect. They have plenty of money; their father is a prestigious district court judge and their mother is running a what seems to be successful campaign for Congress. However, things are not what they seem. Kaeleigh is the good girl, which she has tried so hard to be since she was nine and her father started sexually abusing her. She deals with her pain by cutting, bingeing, and purging. Raeanne, on the other hand, uses painkillers, drugs, alcohol, and sex to forget both the rejection of not being Daddy's favorite and the guilt she feels for being unable to protect Kaeleigh. Both girls are barely hanging on by a thread that can't hold much longer.

This is one of my favorite Ellen Hopkins books. Whereas some of the others become repetitive and don't have a lot of memorable plot points, this is a fresh story with an interesting twist. Admittedly, I figured the twist out after about 50 pages due to some clues I'd overheard, but I still enjoyed it. Also, I like that Hopkins is looking at an extremely difficult subject from multiple angles this time as opposed to having one perspective like she usually does. The verse format still bugged me with this one, as it mostly reads like prose that just happens to be divided up in random places. There are a few parts that actually sound poetic or have some cool text design on the page, but a lot of it sounds just like a regular novel when you read it out loud. That distracts me and bothers me because it makes me feel like the novel-in-verse thing is just a gimmick. That said, I still like this book a lot and will definitely be recommending it to readers of gritty realistic fiction.