The Identicals
by Elin Hilderbrand · 2017
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 4.2/5
Elin Hilderbrand’s The Identicals uses twin sisters, two islands, and a great deal of social friction to explore how family likeness can conceal profound difference. It is a polished, observant summer novel with real emotional intelligence, even if its plotting sometimes shows its seams.
The Identicals turns a familiar summer premise into a brisk, emotionally literate study of sisterhood and self-invention.
Elin Hilderbrand is working in a mode she has made her own: the sunlit social novel, attentive to appetite, class, weather, and the private humiliations that accumulate inside a family. The Identicals is not her most ambitious book, but it is one of her more assured; it understands that sibling rivalry is often just love gone crooked. Its pleasures are real, even if some of its machinery is visible from the start.
The novel begins with a clean, almost comic premise: identical twin sisters, Harper and Tabitha Frost, have spent years estranged, living on neighboring but socially distinct islands, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Hilderbrand uses that setup to explore more than a gimmick of mistaken identity; she turns it into a study of the stories families tell about themselves, and of how geography can become destiny. Harper, loose-limbed and unguarded, and Tabitha, polished and self-protective, are mirror images only on the surface. Their differences are rendered with enough acuity that the reader never mistakes sameness for sameness of soul.
What Hilderbrand does especially well here is texture. The novel is full of ferry crossings, gossip networks, seasonal labor, summer houses, and the social weather of wealthy islands where everyone knows, or thinks they know, everyone else. She has a gift for making domestic detail feel like plot; a conversation at dinner, a glance at a wedding, or a family slight remembered too late can move the book as decisively as any formal revelation. The result is a narrative that reads with the ease of a well-run tide: not exactly surprising, but hard to resist once you are in it.
The book is also emotionally shrewd about the way resentment and tenderness coexist. Harper and Tabitha are not abstract symbols of opposites; they are adults whose grievances have hardened into identity, and Hilderbrand is smart about how old injuries can make people theatrical, defensive, and faintly ridiculous. There is humor in the novel, but it is the rueful kind that comes from recognizing one’s own family at a bad angle. The best scenes have an almost therapeutic candor about embarrassment, maternal pressure, and the compromises women make to be loved without being seen too closely.
Still, the novel’s smoothness is also its limitation. Hilderbrand occasionally relies on coincidence and tidy reversals to keep the twin-switch premise humming, and the plotting can feel engineered to deliver emotional payoffs that are more satisfying than inevitable. Some of the secondary characters are sketched with the quick confidence of a summer novel rather than the depth of a fully imagined life, and a few of the romantic turns arrive with less resistance than the book’s psychological material deserves. The Identicals is at its weakest when it leans on convenience instead of consequence.
Even so, the book leaves a pleasing afterimage because it knows what kind of novel it wants to be. It is not trying to dismantle the family saga from within; it is trying to make the familiar sharp again, and for the most part it succeeds. Hilderbrand writes with a steady hand about the indignities of being known by the wrong name, the longing to be chosen, and the strange freedom of being mistaken for someone else. That is a small idea, but in her hands it becomes a durable one.
Key Takeaways
- Sisterly estrangement
- Island social codes
- Coincidence and fate
Summary
- The novel centers on estranged identical twins Harper and Tabitha Frost, whose lives on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard have diverged into almost opposite temperaments.
- Hilderbrand turns a high-concept premise into a family novel about memory, resentment, and the stories relatives use to survive one another.
- The island setting is rendered with unusual specificity; ferries, seasonal economies, and social gossip all shape the action.
- The book is strongest in its scenes of domestic friction, where embarrassment and affection are allowed to coexist.
- Harper and Tabitha are sharply differentiated, and their emotional differences are more interesting than the fact of their resemblance.
- The plotting is efficient and reader-friendly, but it occasionally depends too heavily on coincidence and tidy reversals.
- Some supporting characters feel more functional than fully inhabited, especially when the novel needs them to move events along.
- Overall, this is polished, intelligent summer fiction that knows its lane and mostly drives it very well.
Chapter Guide
- Chapter 1: Twenty Miles Apart
- Identical twins Harper and Tabitha Frost live on different islands—Harper on Martha's Vineyard, Tabitha on Nantucket—and barely speak after a betrayal that hardened into family myth.
- Chapter 2: Trading Islands
- A practical summer crisis makes the sisters agree to trade islands. The arrangement solves immediate problems, but it also forces each woman to live inside the life she has spent years scorning.
- Chapter 3: Harper in Nantucket
- On Nantucket, Harper confronts Tabitha's polished routines, social obligations, and carefully managed reputation. From inside that life, she begins to see how much loneliness elegance has been hiding.
- Chapter 4: Tabitha on the Vineyard
- Tabitha lands in Harper's looser Vineyard world and must navigate Ainsley, old neighbors, and the emotional debris Harper has been carrying. Her certainties begin to soften into curiosity.
- Chapter 5: Versions of the Past
- Separated from their usual defenses, both women revisit the romance and resentment that split them apart. Old gossip returns, and each sister sees how incomplete her own version of the past has been.
Read the full review at https://reviewerinsight.com/book/6a0548c567b7ef01e2cadc99/the-identicals