[I received a free electronic review copy of this book from Netgalley and Wednesday Books in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.]
Summary
Siri was certain her back injury would heal up and she’d be back to dancing by now. So when the doctor tells her she can’t dance ever again, she’s devastated. Her mom ships her off to a “Rediscover Yourself” retreat in Colorado where she’s supposed to somehow “find her way.” Like that could happen after everything has fallen apart.
Jamie’s launch to independence didn’t quite go as planned. So she’s back home with her dad and Grams. One of her dad’s conditions to her moving home is that she either go to therapy or go to a “Rediscover Yourself” yoga retreat her grandmother mentioned.
While Siri sees Jamie as an annoyance at the retreat where she doesn’t want to be anyway, Jamie is stunned to see her little sister there. It’s been 14 years. And apparently Siri has no memory of Jamie. Siri thought “Jamie” was an imaginary friend and has spent those years apart trying to not feel crazy because she was so attached to this imaginary friend. A real-life, in-her-face Jamie is unfathomable at first.
As the two try to make sense of their past as well as their present reality, they decide they want to switch places after the retreat so they can get some closure on the mess their parents have made of things. They figure they will pretend to be one another – they look enough alike to be twins – and then bamboozle their parents into a big meet up. What could go wrong?
How about a magic glitter bomb that somehow causes the girls to switch bodies?
Review
So, I wanted to like this. I stuck with this one FAR longer than I usually do for a book I’m just not feeling. I was intrigued by the whole “How could Siri’s mom lie to her so egregiously like that?” plot line. But in the end, I gave up at about 65%. I didn’t like Siri or Jamie, although Siri was more tolerable once she got to California. The girls were both abrasive and hard to like. Siri’s weird not-swearing thing got old really fast. (Instead of “S***” she says “Excrement,” for example – you can imagine what she does with the f-word.) The most likeable character, Dawn, is a side character who doesn’t get much development because she is not the focus. But I would have liked either more of her, or a more direct story about the imaginary friend lie. The fact that both girls have grandparents who went along with this ridiculous thing is, I guess, something that should have bothered me more in the original Parent Trap. But the “twins” were so endearing in those movies, I didn’t stop to ask. The magical switching complicated this rather than making it more fun. (I’ve read complaints online not unlike the ones for Wonder Woman 1984 about what right a person has to use someone else’s body/face for their own purposes.)
If you are super into the whole premise, or you have a higher tolerance for abrasive characters than I do, or if you like the author’s other work, you might give this a try. But it was a bad fit for me.
Rating: ♥
*♥ = Problematic, did not finish.