#18: Half Life by Shelley Jackson

When reading this book, it did not take me long to discover that it was about 150 pages too long. I have never seen such unnecessary language in my life. The concept of Half Life was a good one, but the book as a whole was not. It was like someone had severely overused the synonym function in Word. Jackson writes about a world in which there is an unusually large population of conjoined twins, called “twofers”. The main character, Nora, struggles with her identity and eventually attempts to have her twin’s head removed due to its inactivity (she’s been asleep for 15 years). It is an age old tale, the girl trying to discover herself, but this was so absurdly written that it was all I could do just to finish it. To put it simply, the story was drowned by the words.