I am having a hard time figuring out how much I liked this book. On the one hand, it was kind of depressing and hard to read, and I didn't exactly want to seek it out to spend more time reading it. I wasn't rushing back to get to it. But on the other hand, the emotions and the feelings in this book felt so real and hard and strong. This book is about Sara Louise, who is eaten up with jealousy of her twin sister Caroline, and feels like she isn't loved or cared about as much as her. I felt like Caroline was easy to hate if she would have been your peer like she was Sara Louise's. I would have been just as upset as she was. Sara Louise was not an easy-to-love narrator herself, though--she was grumpy and unfriendly and filled with anger a lot of the time, which only pushed people more and more towards Caroline. But I thought those emotions and Sara Louise's over-the-top reactions made this book the gripping story that it was. When Sara Louise threw her bottle of lotion at the wall because Caroline was using it without asking her, and when she refused her parents' offer of paying for her boarding school because she was so upset that Caroline was getting to go to a nicer school in Baltimore--those are exactly the irrational, unrealistic things that an upset teenager might do. So although it was not the most fun book to read, I really felt Sara Louise's feelings of disappointment and anger over and over again. (I also really liked the setting and the imagery of the island and the crabbing and everything they did there as well. And the ending with Sara Louise all grown up as a midwife in the mountains--that was unexpected and I loved that.)
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