***/*****
So, we have Helen and Ellie, identical twins with the worst mother ever! After their father’s suicide, their mother basically shuts down for two years and when the girls are 6 years old, they decide to change places. Ellie, who was a little slow and a follower pretends to be Helen, who is basically a bully who gives her sister “lessons.” But when they go in to “amuse” their almost catatonic mother with this charade, they meet Horace, aka, Akela, their mother’s new beau and Ellie decides to keep being Helen. And when real Helen asserts the truth, no one, not even her mother believes her. This goes on for the rest of her life. Just when the reader thinks someone will believe her (and really it wouldn’t have been that difficult at later parts in the book to put 2 and 2 together), they just fall back on the mother’s vitriol and turn on her.
Flash forward 25ish years and Ellie/Helen (from now on, Hellie), a famous daytime TV presenter, has been in a car accident resulting in a coma and Helen/Ellie (from now on, ugh, Smudge), is living in poverty, hearing voices and jonesing for a cigarette and some vodka. Their horrible mother calls Smudge to tell her about the accident and Hellie’s husband Nick comes poking around.
Told in the present timeline of Smudge dealing with her family for the first time in 15 years and meeting Hellie’s daughter Heloise, and flashbacks covering all of Smudge’s life from the switch to the present and beyond, the reader is presented with what has to be one of the most depressing and awful lives ever. I think of Jo in Bleak House; there is absolutely no hope for this poor woman. Bad luck every which way she turns. Just when things seem to turn up for her, something shifts and she’s back on the streets again.
It’s not a thriller like the blurb states. This is a straight up character study, dealing with identity and the loss of it. I just couldn’t get past the way the mother treated whoever was Ellie at any given time. Before the switch she didn’t seem to care for her and after, she treats Helen (who is forced to be Ellie – I know it’s a little silly and confusing) poorly. It makes me wonder how Ellie would have fared had the switch never happened. Helen seemed to be a teeny bit better prepared to deal with things.
Overall, not horrible, not great. The writing is good, but it starts to draaagg about 65% in. There’s only so much of Smudge’s horrible life I can take. Her life is pretty terrible from 6 to 33 years old and it doesn’t need to be hammered home so much.
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