Identical twins Laurel and Daphne delight in their doppleganger attributes and are inseparable - until they're not! As young girls they develop their own cryptic langue and fascination with words they find absurd. Cathleen Schine's novel is at its beguiling best when the twin's were a complicated organism circumventing superfulous attachments. The twins were within a magic circle that protected them from being alone. They derided pleasure in their glib torment of those befuddled by their profound alignment. They share everything including a fatuous fascination with erudite vernacular. Both are sticklers for grooming precise grammar. (Their favorite musical is "My Fair Lady"). Oh wouldn't it be loverly if all remain in harmony between the sisters. Whoa to the mister who comes between the sisters. In actuality, the perfidy that forges a fissure between the sisters isn't caused by their spouses. Their feud is fermented over a gargantuas Webster Dictionary and its pedestal. Their beloved dad brought it home when they were saplings. A shared cavalcade of tears following their father's death doesn't mitigate an altercation over sole ownership and tears their bond asunder. Daphne dabbles as a pedantic copy editor & columnist. Laurel's career as a school teacher takes a trajectory towards poetry. The arcane prattle dissecting language is lugubrious. And, their quotidian lives banal. Schine's attempt to educate readers on the elusive and obvious fragments of the English language is lame. "Language keeps changing. And to understand language and teach it you have to know what is actually spoken." Oh, lots of chatter that didn't matter. Why didn't Schine find twin dynamics dramatic enough material to materialize into something...loverly?
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