Judith and Katherine, or as they prefer, Jude and Kat, are mirror-image identical twins (they have the same features on opposite sides of their bodies, such as the same birthmark on opposite shoulders). But there is one big difference. Jude can remember all of their 22 years, but Kat has recently survived a terrible car accident that has left her with amnesia. Experiencing everything “again for the very first time,” she relies on Jude to tell her their life story, because, Jude says, their mother is dead and their father took off years ago. Some things seem puzzling, such as why the photos of their before-the-accident European trip don’t show the sisters at all, only landmarks. Readers learn why in those sections of the book that look at life before the crash, when the girls and their mother left mainstream society to live with the controlling King Bash, whose mantra was “What you think, is.” The pressure to will happiness and satisfaction into being, and the child abuse led by Bash, brews a toxic storm that Jude tries to keep in their past. But the past threatens to explode when a mysterious figure starts turning up at random places in the present. Kahler has a quietly compelling way of revealing secrets and of portraying a close sibling bond, creating an unusual debut novel (as Karen Abbott, Kahler is an Edgar Award nominee for Best Fact Crime for The Ghosts of Eden Park) that will be a hit with those who enjoyed the recent religious-cult documentaries Shiny Happy People and Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey
