by Nancy Boland

Created on: August 08, 2009

The girls

By Lori Lansens

Rose and Ruby Darlen are 29, and the world's oldest living craniopagus twins. Budding, attached at the head, during a violent tornado and deserted by their frightened adolescent mother, they have been brought up by Lovey Darlen, the intensely protective nurse who delivered them, and her placid immigrant husband, Uncle Stash. Fields and corn shape the setting to their life in serene Southern Ontario, where: We've been called many things: freaks, horrors, monsters, devils, witches, retards, wonders, marvels. To most, we're a curiosity. In small-town Leaford, where we live and work, we're just "The Girls."

Rose, the profound, lyrical twin, is both sporty and intellectual. Lasting physical attachment to her weak yet more realistic sister let down her likelihood of going to university. Her long legs and 5ft 5in frame, maximised by characteristics are "misshapen and frankly grotesque" sustain the beautiful Ruby, who did not outshine at school, and is girly , preferring television to books and has devout beliefs in god, ghosts and reincarnation.

In the weeks leading to their 30thbirthday Rose receives the somewhat expected diagnosis of a brain aneurysm. The intricacy of their correlated veins in their joint heads means that the outcome will be terminal for both sisters. They then begin - Rose with inspired insistence on her much-cherished laptop, Ruby sweating away with straightforward unwillingness on a yellow legal pad - to lay down their own interpretations of their life story. For as Ruby explains: "Our thoughts are distinctly our own".

The girls grow up surrounded by mirrors - to allow them to see each other - under the watchful eye of their adopted parents. Identical twins who refuse all similarities besides the stark fact of their conjoinment. Rose notes; "I've never set eyes on my sister, except in mirror images and photographs, but I know Ruby's gestures as my own, through the movement of her muscles and bone. I love my sister as I love myself. I hate her that way too." The major episodes in their lives - the eternal mourning of their nearby neighbours who lose their only son in the tornado, coincidently the event which indicates the twins' birth; a prank by a friend which very nearly leads to their drowning at their eighth birthday party; a shared crush on the debauched Frankie Foyle, who gives Ruby her first kiss and concurrently takes Rose's virginity - are entwined with sensitive portrayals of Lovey and Stash's early romance.

One twin becomes pregnant and a child is lost. A descriptively entrancing yet faintly absurd journey is undertaken to Uncle Stash's native Slovakia to bury his mother's ashes (a narrative of frustrating daydreams which interfere with the overall tone of the book ). Deaths occur, both unexpected and deliberate; goodbyes and reunions; relationships and employment, continuity and love. In brief, the changeable events of normal life.

Lori Lansens' talent lies in establishing the remarkable nuzzling among the everyday. Her previous novel, Rush Home Road, used a misleadingly minor trivial story of an elderly black woman's life to expose the wider tale of slavery in northern America and Southern Canada. In The Girls, she portrays how relentlessly limited; prematurely abridged lives can be wholly jam-packed. It could have been a maudlin, over-sentimental affair, but mostly evades this by adequately balancing Rose's quivering idealism; "How cruel it must be for a man to live past his soul", with Ruby's satirical remarks: "Rose tends to exaggerate things so there's a warning for you. She also tends to round things off. Know what I mean?" Lansens' merge of cool and emotional gives an above all honest depiction.

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