Product Description

In Lori Lansens’ astonishing second novel, readers come to know and love two of the most remarkable characters in Canadian fiction. Rose and Ruby are twenty-nine-year-old conjoined twins. Born during a tornado to a shocked teenaged mother in the hospital at Leaford, Ontario, they are raised by the nurse who helped usher them into the world. Aunt Lovey and her husband, Uncle Stash, are middle-aged and with no children of their own. They relocate from the town to the drafty old farmhouse in the country that has been in Lovey’s family for generations.

Joined to Ruby at the head, Rose’s face is pulled to one side, but she has full use of her limbs. Ruby has a beautiful face, but her body is tiny and she is unable to walk. She rests her legs on her sister’s hip, rather like a small child or a doll.

In spite of their situation, the girls lead surprisingly separate lives. Rose is bookish and a baseball fan. Ruby is fond of trash TV and has a passion for local history.

Rose has always wanted to be a writer, and as the novel opens, she begins to pen her autobiography. Here is how she begins:

I have never looked into my sister’s eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to a beguiling moon. I’ve never used an airplane bathroom. Or worn a hat. Or been kissed like that. I’ve never driven a car. Or slept through the night. Never a private talk. Or solo walk. I’ve never climbed a tree. Or faded into a crowd. So many things I’ve never done, but oh, how I’ve been loved. And, if such things were to be, I’d live a thousand lives as me, to be loved so exponentially.

Ruby, with her marvellous characteristic logic, points out that Rose’s autobiography will have to be Ruby’s as well — and how can she trust Rose to represent her story accurately? Soon, Ruby decides to chime in with chapters of her own.

The novel begins with Rose, but eventually moves to Ruby’s point of view and then switches back and forth. Because the girls face in slightly different directions, neither can see what the other is writing, and they don’t tell each other either. The reader is treated to sometimes overlapping stories told in two wonderfully distinct styles. Rose is given to introspection and secrecy. Ruby’s style is "tell-all" — frank and decidedly sweet.

We learn of their early years as the town "freaks" and of Lovey’s and Stash’s determination to give them as normal an upbringing as possible. But when we meet them, both Lovey and Stash are dead, the girls have moved back into town, and they’ve received some ominous news. They are on the verge of becoming the oldest surviving craniopagus (joined at the head) twins in history, but the question of whether they’ll live to celebrate their thirtieth birthday is suddenly impossible to answer.

In Rose and Ruby, Lori Lansens has created two precious characters, each distinct and loveable in their very different ways, and has given them a world in Leaford that rings absolutely true. The girls are unforgettable. The Girls is nothing short of a tour de force.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #668669 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD

Amazon.ca
In 29 years, Rose Darlen has never spent a moment apart from her twin sister, Ruby. She has never gone for a solitary walk or had a private conversation. Yet, in all that time, she has never once looked into Ruby's eyes. Joined at the head, "The Girls" (as they are known in their small Ontario town) are the world's oldest surviving craniopagus twins. In her astonishing second novel, Lori Lansens (author of Rush Home Road) ventures into the strange world of physical abnormality that Barbara Gowdy so chillingly explored in We So Seldom Look on Love. While some writers might be tempted to play up the grotesque aspects of life as a conjoined twin, Lansens treats her so-called freaks with sensitivity and respect. The result is an extraordinarily moving narrative about human connectedness that questions the very meaning of "normal."

The Girls is a fictional autobiography of the Darlen twins, mostly told by Rose but with occasional chapters by Ruby. The stronger and more frustrated of the two, Rose longs to become a published writer but tends to conceal or distort disturbing incidents from their shared past. Ruby, by contrast, tells it like it is, but is much more accepting of their intertwined fate. (Ruby is also the prettier twin, and one of the most poignant and shocking scenes in the novel is Rose's account of her--or rather their--first sexual experience.) As Rose and Ruby describe their relatively sheltered childhood, rocky adolescence, and tentative experiments with love, the interplay between these two distinct voices heightens the dramatic tension of what's to come. The saddest part is saying good-bye--to "The Girls" and to this compassionately written novel. --Lisa Alward

Books in Canada
Lori Lansens’s The Girls is the fictional autobiography of the world’s “oldest surviving craniopagus twins.” Rose and Ruby Darlen, born in the blacked-out aftermath of a tornado, are joined at the head; they share a common blood supply and can never be separated. Abandoned by their birth mother, they are quickly adopted by a delighted nurse, Lovey Darlen and her husband Stash. As their thirtieth birthday approaches, the bookish Rose decides to make good on a fifteen-year-old promise and write her life story. She waspishly invites her “somewhat lazy” sister Ruby to write a few chapters as well, though they agree not to read each others’ work. The result is a captivating, tender story of identity, attachment, and love.
As she did in Rush Home Road, Lansens draws fragile, irresistible characters. The girls’ fiercely devoted Aunt Lovey teaches her daughters self-reliance and gratitude; Uncle Stash, her husband, is a gentle butcher of few but fervent words and a compulsive photographer; and the wraithlike Cathy Merkel, who helps deliver the girls, is a study in grief.
Some characters exist only as fascinating absences. For years, Rose and Ruby take turns pretending Larry Merkel, a four-year-old swept away by the tornado on the girls’ birth date and never found, is their boyfriend. The girls’ birth mother, a panicky teenager who gives her name as Elizabeth Taylor before wobbling off the scene, is a potent absence too. Throughout their lives, Rose and Ruby recast and embroider the meagre information they have about her-reaching entirely different conclusions. Later, another Taylor, an oddly conceived infant, is the object of endless wistful speculation.
And the girls themselves: what remarkable voices they have! Rose addresses us as though we are anthropologists. Her tone is earnest, stoic, and wry; we get the sense that she doesn’t hold out great hope for Ruby’s contributions. She has an urgent and ambitious plan to set down the essential facts of her life at the rate of four pages per day. She considers at length which events to include, and frets about structure and style. But Rose is a romantic too, a poet whose rhymes occasionally steal into her prose.
In contrast, Ruby is chatty, unpretentious, and endearingly honest about herself (“I don’t really like to learn. I just like to know.”). More outgoing than her scholarly sister, she relies on an intuitive knowledge of her twin. Watching Rose read, she says, “She’s frowning, which means she loves it.” Ruby has her own pursuits. She believes she is at least as well known for her discovery of Neutral Indian artifacts as she is for being a conjoined twin. Ever the optimist, she actually plans a surprise birthday party for her sister. Many of the book’s funniest moments reside in the difference between Rose and Ruby’s recollection of the same events.
The girls’ lives are often as odd as their appearance. Significant events-birth, courtship, family trips, deaths and burials-unfold as variations on the the girls’ own kind of strangeness . Denied baptism by the local priest, for instance, the girls prevail on a visiting nine-year-old boy to baptize them in the creek, and end up nearly drowning. Other landmark moments are equally bizarre, although no one really seems to notice. Rose says, “The strangest thing about strange things is that they’re only strange when you hear about them or imagine them or think about them later, but never when you’re living them. (I believe I can speak about that with some authority.)” Nothing develops as we might expect. But it is our primary reaction-automatic pity-which takes the biggest beating. Far from requiring or appreciating pity, Ruby and Rose feel blessed. “Ruby and I endure because of our connectedness. Maybe we all do. How can that be a curse?”
The use of two first-person narrators is fascinating. Physically they are one traveller; these two have lived the same life, and yet they haven’t. Rose and Ruby make different choices about what to tell us. Each predicts, often incorrectly, what the other might have already said. And where their accounts do cover the same territory, they conflict. Many details are manufactured or borrowed from Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash. (Aunt Lovey concedes that she has made up much of the story about how she and Stash met, using what she knows about Stash’s personality.) Like any two people, Rose and Ruby negotiate and report the world differently. Their interests, affections, appetites-all are distinct. In fact, their physical connection actually means that they can never see the same things at the same time. They have only ever glimpsed one another in photos, or in the numerous mirrors hung for that purpose. As Rose notes, their story is “combed by memory and set by imagination.” Their conjoinment proves misleading-their dual points of view seem to offer half, not twice, the certainty. Despite their shared circumstances, we can’t know the whole truth about the girls, or the people around them.
Beyond physical attachment is devotion; throughout, love is a deep, sustained note. Aunt Lovey is enchanted by the girls from the moment she sets eyes on them, and resolves to keep them. When Stash feebly opposes her, saying that they are attached, she retorts, “They’re attached to me.” Aunt Lovey and Stash express their deep connection through almost wordless tenderness, murmuring “You” to one another. Their neighbour, Nick, has no facility for conventional good behaviour, but his inarticulate devotion to the girls is invaluable to them, and redemptive for him. Though they are often disgruntled with one another, the girls, too, have small, private gestures that telegraph their love for one another. Rose and Ruby’s relationship calls on an exquisite understanding of conflict and compromise. This intimate connection accompanies them even into their separate dreams.
Though we may approach The Girls with the curiosity of carnival-goers, what’s behind the curtain is not the spectacle we expected. Ruby and Rose Darlen are sisters, unutterably dear to one another, who happen to be conjoined. The interesting fact of their conjoinment is ultimately upstaged by a truth that has two faces: first, that love is the “common blood supply” that binds us to our dear ones through attachments seen and unseen; second, that sometimes the physical “truth” is beside the point. The Girls is beautifully rendered, a wonderful, funny, heartbreaking tale.
Nancy Fischer (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
Conjoined twins Rose and Ruby Darlen are linked at the side of the head, with separate brains and bodies. Born in a small town outside Toronto in the midst of a tornado and abandoned by their unwed teenage mother two weeks later, the girls are cared for by Aunt Lovey, a nurse who refuses to see them as deformed or even disabled. She raises them in Leaford, Ontario, where, at age 29, Rose, the more verbal and bookish twin, begins writing their story—i.e., this novel, which begins, "I have never looked into my sister's eyes." Showing both linguistic skill and a gift for observation, Lansens's Rose evokes country life, including descriptions of corn and crows, and their neighbors Mrs. Merkel, who lost her only son in the tornado, and Frankie Foyle, who takes the twins' virginity. Rose shares her darkest memory (public humiliation during a visit to their Slovakian-born Uncle Stash's hometown) and her deepest regret, while Ruby, the prettier, more practical twin, who writes at her sister's insistence, offers critical details, such as what prompted Rose to write their life story. Through their alternating narratives, Lansens captures a contradictory longing for independence and togetherness that transcends the book's enormous conceit. (May 2)
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Customer Reviews

Unbelievably believable!
Lyrical, poetic prose opens this heartwarming and unique story of conjoined twins Rose and Ruby and the lives they led, both separately as two individuals with different likes and dislikes and together as sisters who must rely on each other solely for their very existence. Joined at the head, `The Girls'--as they are known as in their small Ontario town--are raised by loving adoptive parents Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash, after their birth mother disappears shortly after giving birth. The conjoined twins are considered the pride of the town, not an oddity, and they rise above what most of us would think of as a handicap or disability and love each other unconditionally.

The Girls is a diary told in two voices--Rose's and Ruby's. Rose encourages her sister to contribute to what will become their life story and although she does most of the writing, both characters come to life as they observe the lives of everyone they meet, sharing their innermost thoughts, hopes, fears and dreams with the reader. I found myself so connected to Rose and Ruby that I didn't want their story to end, and when it did, I was left with a bittersweet ache for more.

The first paragraph reads like pure, sweet poetry that is sure to haunt any reader; it is what first grabbed me and pulled at my heart. The Girls opens like this:

"I have never looked into my sister's eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to a beguiling moon. I've never used an airplane bathroom. Or worn a hat. Or been kissed like that...So many things I've never done, but oh, how I've been loved. And, if such things were to be, I'd live a thousand lives as me, to be loved so exponentially."

Lori Lansens is an extraordinary Canadian author who paints a picture of rural Ontario farm life and two distinct lives with a magic wand of effortlessness, vividly colorful description and heartfelt compassion. At times you'll forget you're reading a novel because it reads with such clarity and believability. In fact, this novel is so full of realism, you may find yourself flipping to the author's photograph at the back of the book to see if she is a conjoined twin. Instead, you'll find her sitting alone at one end of a sofa, as if waiting for someone to join her.

The Girls is a MUST READ for anyone who enjoys an emotional tale of love, loss and the challenges of life. Other books of comparable emotional impact: The Lovely Bones and Mothering Mother: A Daughter's Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir.

~Cheryl Kaye Tardif,
bestselling author of Whale Song

LIFE IS WHAT ONE MAKES OF IT...
This is a beautifully written story about conjoined twins named Rose and Ruby. Abandoned by their mother at birth, they are adopted by a kindly couple, Lovey and Stash Darlen. Lovey was one of the nurses present at the hospital when they were born.

Conjoined at the head, Rose and Ruby have a symbiotic relationship. Yet, for all their symbiosis, they are two very different and unique individuals. When Rose, who has a penchant for writing, decides to write her memoir, Ruby decides to add her two cents and write some chapters herself. This book is the story of their lives.

Written as two parallel stories, the author makes the voice of each twin distinct. Each of their narratives is redolent of the personality and world view of the twin writing the chapter. This is difficult to do, and the author succeeds brilliantly. This is certainly a book that will keep the reader turning the pages, At times heartbreakingly poignant, the book is infused with humor and wit, as well as a strong reminder that life is what one makes of it. Bravo!

Gave it a good shot and couldn't finish it
My response is similar to that of the reader who thought the book had potential BUT... After initial enthusiasm for the novel, I frankly became quite bored with it. Told in two voices (which aren't always particularly distinct--hence the use of two different fonts), the book has an initially inviting conversational tone. However, as everyone knows, transcripts of conversations can be rather dull and repetitive--and that's what the book often feels like: a transcript which needed a good "editing out" of extraneous detail. For example, I got really tired of one of the characters repeatedly saying "back to the story". (This is my point: there are so many digressions, that the story--whatever it is--sort of gets lost.) I felt the author did not give enough attention to the structure of the narrative. The story is "all over the place", and the narrative doesn't unfold in carefully thought-out way. Information is revealed in a random and haphazard manner. These factors made me completely lose interest halfway through. I pushed myself along, hoping things would improve. At two-thirds of the way, I just gave up. While I quite agree that this is an interesting topic--one that makes one ponder--the novel's clumsiness--its lack of artistry--was distracting to me. Hence, I was not able to enter Rose and Ruby's world. In the end, I was quite disappointed with The Girls. Obviously, lots of people are enthusiastic about Lansen's novel and I respect that and the author's obvious sincerity in bringing different lives to the page. If you, the reader, aren't irked by stylistic and structural weaknesses, the book may interest you.