She raised her eyebrows in surprise. I'd caught her off guard. Why would you ask that?"
"I don't know."
"Did you go through my things?"
Blood rushed to my face. My heart beat quickened.
"You did, didn't you?"
"I didn't. I swear. It's another one of those things. Like the lamp. Like the water stain.
"I never had a miscarriage," my mother said.
I turned back to the window. The girls--one in pink, one in yellow--were across the road now, straddling their matching bikes. They looked up and waved. The sky rumbled. I closed the window.
"Sometimes you scare me, Eleanor."
My mother went back to her box. Digging. Poking. Searching for something.
"Is this what you're talking about? She handed over two grainy, black-and-white photos on thin, filmy paper. I'd seen them before. I knew them, had held them.
"I was pregnant with twins. That's you. There were two babies, and then one day one of the babies disappeared. It wasn't a miscarriage, though. A miscarriage is different."
"If she didn't come out, where is she?
My mother let out a sound like a leaky tire, a sound that said, Can we not do this now?
Fine. You can learn anything on the Internet. It's called Vanishing Twin Syndrome. It's more common that you'd think, but that doesn't make it any less freaky. My mother was telling the truth. The baby never left her body. It entered mine. "Absorbed" is the word they use. A nice way of saying "consumed," I guess. Devoured. Ingested. It all seems the same thing: I'm a cannibal. Like I'm not defective enough.
~~~
The In-Between
By Barbara Stewart
Check out other reviews for book description; this is more a cautionary opinion review than I normally do. The book itself deserves a 4 or 5 for adults...Just my Personal Opinion, Of Course
I was bothered by this book--something like how The Exorcist once bothered me. I was an adult when I encountered both. I don't know, but it seems to me that there is nothing "sacred" any more. By that I'm not talking about religion... although I do believe in the supernatural existence of a higher power, hence the ability to conceive just about anything... My thoughts are more related to what and how we portray our own lives, in books, in movies, in music. Even if I'm older than many of you, don't think for one moment I have not at least been exposed to most of what is in life...
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| A tear crawled down my nose. I was crying but I didn't know why. It wasn't my dad. It was something else. It was Autumn. It was me. It was two freaks hanging out in a musty clubhouse drinking warm soda, listening for Bigfoot, discussing creepy souvenirs. Autumn popping fruit chews like they're medicine; me, wanting so badly to tell her how my best friend is a ghost. What's embarrassing is that I think I was actually having fun. Maybe "fun" isn't the right word. I didn't feel like I wanted to be somewhere else. How messed up is that? I'll never be normal. It's not who I am. I've known this forever. Sometimes it just sneaks up on me. ~~~ |
Laura Wiess is quoted on the front cover "A dark, compelling story of love, loneliness and obsession spun out of control...chilling, heartbreaking, and nerve-wracking...
in the best possible way..." This last phrase is what I disagree with as it relates to today's youth...
This book takes an incident of birth, where a mother was pregnant for two children, but one of them disappeared, as I understand it, consumed, or more likely, naturally absorbed by the mother's body or by the other baby's needs...
Being a twin was found out by the daughter of the couple while she is a teenager... Whether or not she should have been told about that was, of course, a parental decision and perhaps these parents did. After Elanor finds out, she begins to have dreams, one of which is a child actually eating the other, in the most horrible ways imaginable in our nightmares...
There is another issue about the book, probably because of my own situation where I became clinically depressed, burnout, emotionally unstable--whatever you want to call it. For this book, the young girl has had emotional issues in the past. And there is quite a bit of reference of her stealing her mother's pills and/or trying to get them illegally. Of course, that had to be the case in order for what happened to have happened...
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| Someone wants to kill me. I don't understand. What did I ever do to anybody? What did I do to deserve a note in my locker that says I must die? ELANOR MUST DIE. ...I'm sure it's the same demented person who drew the picture in the girls' bathroom. It has to be... He doesn't know about the baby eating the baby on the bathroom wall. I didn't tell him, because I didn't want to explain what the picture meant, how I knew it was meant for me... Why would someone write something like that? I have friends. No one wanted to kill me when my life sucked. When I wanted to die, no one wanted me dead. I had to try to do it myself. Maybe it's someone like Old Ellie, someone with nothing, someone with no one. I used to hate girls like me--New Ellie--because they had what I wanted: a life. Don't freak out. How can I not freak out? How can I not take it seriously? Rad's being naive. My fear isn't irrational. Stuff like that goes on all the time. You see it on TV, in breaking news: Bully Poisons Classmate. Troubled Boy Apprehended in School-Shooting Rampage. Teen dies from Knife Wound. !!! |
In case you haven't read much in this area, we seem to have a troubled time for youth--maybe it's known more because they somehow find guns, take them to schools, and let other people know about their feelings. Is it because, I wonder, that they feel so out of control, but think they have no support system to help them? Is it because we label every lapse of emotional stability as to what is behind the horror movies, books, and, ultimately, real life that we exploit for entertainment.
If, when I began to cry for no reasons (I thought at the time) and couldn't stop, I had not known, automatically, that I was not at fault--it was something outside, namely work overload, that resulted in my inability to control my emotions, then I have no idea what I would have done, other than to know that I had unconditional family support available to me. Not every teenager has that "sure" knowledge.
All I ask, because I can't say that this book is not a unique story worthy of an adult's reading, that if you are considering it for, or as a YA book, that you realize that this is not real--it is a story made up for entertainment.
Explain this to your child if they want to read it. And authors, if you are going to write horror, consider some issues as sacred, especially the emotional, inner thoughts and hopes of teenagers about their lives and
their bodies.
GABixlerReviews
I spent the first nineteen years of my life wanting to be someone else: Laura Ingalls, Elton John, Nancy Spungen, Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath. It was hard finding work as any of those people, so I went to college. That was hard, too, because I had to pick a major. I was interested in a lot of things—psychology, sociology, history—but none of them screamed "career" at me.
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| Listen To Interview... |
I finished my BA in English, married the awesome Dave Kopacek, and moved to the Midwest to get an MFA in Creative Writing. Fast forward through two businesses, a wood-paneled station wagon, a Route 66 pilgrimage, a close call with a tornado, a 1967 Cadillac, a soul-trying move back East, a Shining-like winter in the woods, a run-in with a rabid raccoon, the restoration of an old house, and I still don’t know who I am, but that’s why I write. I’m a kid again; I get to be whoever I want: the tomboy, the rock star, the crazy artist, the drug-sick groupie, the goddess, the suicidal poet.
Now I live in the Catskill Mountains with my still awesome husband and an odd little cat named Shirley. I read a lot of true crime and crochet way too many scarves. I love amusement parks, anything with peanut butter, and Key West. I'm all about gritty, edgy stories with surprise endings. Dark and unsettling endings, too, because life is messy. I also like horror—the supernatural kind—thanks to my grandmother. I still can't believe some of the stuff she let me watch.
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