Summer and Iris are twins. They split on the last possible day in the womb. That’s why Iris is the mirror image of her sister. Summer is right-handed, Iris is left-handed. Even Iris’s internal organs are on the left instead of the right. And she’s always felt like the second daughter. Summer was prettier, smarter, nicer. Iris was identical but somehow less attractive. She was smart but less confident. And she wasn’t all that nice. She had a better relationship with their younger brother Ben, but she always resented Summer just a little. Iris copied Summer’s fashions. She copied her hair. And she envied Summer her perfect marriage.
So when Iris’s marriage falls apart and she heads back to Summer’s house in Australia, she knows that she has some time to figure out her next move, since Summer and her husband Adam are sailing in their yacht for a month. But an emergency phone call from Thailand sent Summer flying out to meet them, to help sail the yacht while their son recovered from surgery at the hospital in Thailand. Iris thought she’d be sailing out with Adam, but instead he stayed with his son and Summer made the sailing trip with Iris.
It would be several weeks of sailing before they got to Seychelles, where Adam’s family lived, and at first the sailing is beautiful. Iris loved to sail as a teenager, and being back out there, on their father’s yacht, she felt right at home. But sailing the ocean with a crew of only two is not easy. Someone has to be watching at all times, and once Summer shared her good news with her sister—that’s she’s pregnant—then Iris insists on doing the bulk of the sailing herself.
Summer volunteers to watch the ship until midnight, since she can’t get to sleep before that anyway, and she sends Iris down to the bedroom to sleep until then. But when Iris wakes up, the sun is up. And the boar doesn’t feel quite right. She heads upstairs to see what’s going on with the boat, but when she realizes that Summer is missing, that’s all that matters. She looks everywhere, but Summer isn’t on the yacht. Iris tries to figure out when it was that she went over, and she turns the ship around to try to find her. But there is nothing. Just water everywhere, nothing else in sight.
Iris is despondent, and she spends all the time she can looking for Summer. But when it gets to the point that the fuel is running out and her water is running out, she knows she has to head for Seychelles. She can explain what happened, and they’ll understand. She thinks. But when she finally gets there, dehydrated, exhausted, and confused, she is taken for Summer and she doesn’t know how to convince them that she’s Iris. She doesn’t know how to break Adam’s heart, to tell him that his wife and baby are gone. And she’s worried of what the police will think. So she pretends to be sister.
And as the days go on, no one notices. And no one seems all that upset that Iris is gone. So she keeps being Summer, the golden daughter., never realizing that being the sister who lived could put her in the worst danger of her life.
The Girl in the Mirror is a twisty thriller about what comes of envy, even between the closest of sisters. Author Rose Carlyle has thought of everything in this family saga—bitterness, resentment, lies, secrets, and competition. No stone has been left unturned in the crafting of this compelling story, from the smallest details of each character to the crazy turns of the story. The Girl in the Mirror is a tight, taut nautical knot of a novel that you will not be able to put down.
I struggled to get into The Girl in the Mirror at first. It starts from Iris’s point of view, and she comes with a lot of emotional baggage. But as the pages go by, as the action takes over, I felt like I could get into her head and understand where she was coming from. Once I could see her point of view, then I was all in and I raced through until the end. I thought I might know where it would end up, but there were plenty of surprises along the way to twist my head and keep me wondering exactly where we were going and how we were going to get there. This is a solid thriller and lots of fun!
Egalleys for The Girl in the Mirror were provided by William Morrow through NetGalley, with many thanks.
