I had planned for September to be a month of slow reading. Maybe one book a week. That didn’t work out, mostly because I’m bored with most podcasts (there are exceptions) and because I’m in school again, which creates a kind of scheduling to my free time somehow. That is all to say that I powered through two novels quickly, both somewhat light-hearted, both focused on the closeness & vulnerability of family.

A friend I trust recommended Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here, a novel I remembered due to its distinctive cover. The cover says a lot about the story. A lot. At the beginning of the novel, our narrator Lillian is contacted by her rich and beautiful high school roommate to take on a job. Lillian, stuck back at home in her late-20s and stuck in jobs she hates, accepts. She is to be a governess to her former roommate’s ten-year-old twin stepchildren, who have a physical condition that I won’t spoil here. It is a funny book, one that does a lot with the physical condition X factor that Wilson imagines. It is also a moving book, one that features Lillian discovering truths about parenthood that … well, that are jarring and precise, given that she has been thrust into it. There’s cool stuff in there about class and friendship, marriage and power, and it is all in the service of watching Lillian buck against / grow into loving someone and loving herself.

Somehow it made sense after Nothing to See Here to move to Cathleen Schine’s The Grammarians, another novel about twins, another one that is surprisingly funny, another one about growing through love. Laurel & Daphne are identical twins with a love for … I was going to say a love of language, but it’s more accurately a love of words. A huge dictionary brought home by their father figures prominently, as does the shared cleverness, the shared lens that these two have on words. I’m not sure you have to be a twin (I’m not) to enjoy the way that Schine navigates the closeness of siblings, and I’m not sure you have to love words to enjoy the way that Schine explores the different ways that Laurel & Daphne explore them. I loved the way that Schine builds a slow tension and rift between them, and I was really moved by how she resolves it in the novel’s resolution.