It's hard to sum up my feelings about this book because it was simutaneously very funny and tragic. It was incredibly fluid which made it a quick read, and its bizarre characters, literary/intellectual satire, bawdy humor, and foreshadowing only added to the page-turning quality. Narrated by the hilariously caustic & inevitably flawed librarian/spinster twin sister of the town slut/glutton, the juxtaposition of their intimate beginning and subsequent divergence is quite entertaining.

There are plenty of fabulous library-related gems inside, one of my favorites being:
"I spent my next hour reshelving, and the next thirty minutes straightening out the Mc's and Mac's. Nobody on God's earth understands the Mc/Mac principle anymore. In order to do that, you have to be willing to think about something other than your genitals for a full minute. Nobody appreciates the horror of a good book dying on the wrong shelf."

Yes! Saw a copy of this in the $1 rack at The Strand tonight! I've been wanting to get one since I borrowed it from Andrea. I love this book.

(What cute names these authors I'm reading this month are having. I may have picked this up on purpose so that I could follow a Jandy with a Jincy.)

I think it's a little bit silly that I liked this so much, but that doesn't bother me.

What really put it over the mark for me was just simply the language. It was just right for me. It reminds me of the way I like to talk, but if the way I talked were written by an outstanding author. The word choices and description and pace of this writing drives home every drop of humor and sadness. You can know a joke is on its way, you can be laughing already at the start of a sentence, but you still can't get out of it without laughing more. (And the same goes for wincing. Laughing and wincing.)

The book is cast with a set of characters that I immediately want to call unbelievable, but the genius is, they are not. The author makes me 100% believe that I could meet every single one of them in real, thoroughly obnoxious life. They are just impotent enough to recognize. The incredible DeVilbisses. Conrad, horribly. And certainly both Dorcas and Abigail, their odd balance of each other, and small rearrangements of the usual tropes of twin sisters. Dorcas finishes Abigail's thoughts for her, indeed, but only because Abigail is too lazy to complete a thought herself.

What drives everything here is a crisis of conscience of our narrator Dorcas, a regular and dull librarian in a regular and dull place, whose sister becomes famous for a crime in a Newsweek kind of way. We're told this story in a weird, meta fashion, because Dorcas is reading a book about her sister's story, and complaining about it to us through her own version of events. It's just barely put-together enough to get pulled into, and I loved this. And though there is a specific story to unravel in it, there is outside of that a somewhat epic feeling. Dorcas doesn't really have a life of her own, but she's got her finger on the life of everything else.

Mainly, at issue is the relationship her sister has with an abusive husband, and the guilt of essentially everyone, what each person ignored or let happen or willfully pursued, and why. And the why is the most important part, as it isn't just about the guilt, but a painfully insightful analysis of the trouble people make, the power games that shove everybody around, and make people act in ways opposite to what they believe. It's also about people's abilities to variously expose the truth and lie to themselves, so much that you would wonder if the narrator is unreliable if Dorcas weren't so frustratingly right all the time. She is right enough, though, to give us every grisly detail of her own mistakes, especially the bizarre, bizarre, bizarre, bizarre friendship she and Abigail's hated husband develop. (It's bizarre.)

It sounds like a lot of people read this expecting a comedy, which can't work, because the story is horrifically dark. And Dorcas is determined, in a car-wreck way, to not let you look away from it for one second. But still, this thing goes on, with all of regular life around it. The humor is almost self-punishment for Dorcas.

Many things here, I think, about gender and sex and violence, could be controversial and offensive in a flash. I'm not even sure that all of my own friends wouldn't hate it. But something about the author's voice felt incredibly important in her expressing these elements. She is generous and understanding in a way that lots of contemporary authors are purposely not, even while being cutting and admitting that she'd rather be selfish. She doesn't like people. (Nor does Dorcas.) But she doesn't like cruelty either, and putting people down is just as much a waste of time as it is unfair.

This matters, a lot, when for instance you're going to write a scene like the um, gang-rape scene. It is of course shocking. But for me, half the shock was in my acceptance of the way it turned out in the story. It's a huge, definitive risk. For me, being taken along with the book this way was rewarding and incredibly impactful.

The period of the book is an interesting choice. It's set a few decades before it was written, without any clear reason to do so. I'm not sure how it helps, but perhaps it somehow just reinforces the oddball archetypes. Not to be overly swayed by the title, but it just feels very, very American.

Nicely written although the whole book is a build up to the inevitable murder scene which pretty much never happens and then it just ends. So that was annoying . . .

Jincy Willett is raw and hilarious in this dark and "scabrously" palpable novel about two sisters. I haven't read a book that allowed me to hate characters with such relish since my last Atwood. Great summer fiction.

I started out really liking this, but as I continued spending time with the very flawed characters I liked them less and less and the book lost something for me.

way better and much more compelling than anticipated. i could write a 10-pager easily on the apollonian/dionysian shit going on here!

I think people should ignore every blurb that's on the cover of this book. It is emphatically not the funniest novel I've ever read, or even close -- Augusten Burroughs and I have different ideas of what "funny" means, maybe? -- but I nonetheless thought it was very good.

I also don't know why people call this a dark comedy, either. There's a particular person's death foreshadowed throughout, but that death in and of itself isn't much of a joke. I actually was a little bit glad of the death; there was an element of justice to it that was pretty clear all along.

The narrator is a crabby spinster librarian, somehow not quite cliche, and hugely enjoyable to read. I'm not sure everyone would embrace her as completely as I did, but I responded to her sarcasm, and to her abiding love of books, immediately.

Intriguing story of fraternal twins sisters.