©2024 Fable Group Inc.
3.0 

Twice Lived

By Joma West
Twice Lived by Joma West digital book - Fable

Why read on Fable?

Discover social reading

Chat inside the ebook with emojis, comments and more

Annotate with notes, tabs, and highlights

Share or keep your notes private with our annotation features

Support the World Literacy Foundation

We donate 20% of every book sale to help children learn to read

Publisher Description

Torn between two families and two lives, a troubled teen must come to terms with losing half their world.

Two Worlds. Two Minds. One Life.

There are two Earths. Perfectly ordinary and existing in parallel. There are no doorways between them, no way to cross from one world to another. Unless you’re a shifter.

Canna and Lily are the same person but they refuse to admit it. Their split psyche has forced them to shift randomly between worlds – between lives and between families – for far longer than they should. But one mind can’t bear this much life. It’ll break under the weight of it all. Soon they’ll experience their final shift and settle at last in one world, but how can they prepare both families for the eventuality of them disappearing forever?

Twice Lived is a novel about family and friendships, and about loss and acceptance, and about the ways we learn to deal with the sheer randomness of life.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

4 Reviews

3.0
Expressionless Face
Unsatisfying ending
“I was really looking forward to this book based on the premise, but the execution unfortunately fell entirely flat for me. There are lots of examples, but a few issues really stuck out to me. The construction was sloppy (why were only the parents in therapy/support groups, even if the children tended to settle sooner? Why didn't anyone introduce the children to other shifters ever?). The world was poorly imagined (why would characters shift to random places instead of shifting to the "other Earth" equivalent of where they are--and if they were shifting to random locations, why were all those locations conveniently in the same city and not on the other side of the planet?). There were also some tense switches that were pretty obviously unintentional, and I can only hope that they were fixed before the book goes fully to print. Other than perhaps Georgia, most of the characters were interchangeable and bland. Tell me something interesting about ANY of Canna's friends or even Jackson, for that matter. For an author who stated that they preferred focusing on character over place, only Canna and Aidha were really developed in a compelling way. Lily and her Hallmark family left me not only annoyed by their overall saccharine portrayal, but irritated by Lily's selfishness and entitlement. And please, authors, don't try to write a child unless you understand children developmentally. I had no clue what age Lolo was for most of the book, especially when she was speaking with a really advanced sentence structure but she could still be picked up and flown around by everyone in the family. The end was the cherry on top of my disappointment. I won't say anything explicit about it, but it was dropped like a bowling ball in the last pages and left me only thinking for the rest of the night about how frustrated I was by the book as a whole. Like so much of the rest of the narrative, it felt like a cop out to a complicated problem. Laying in bed until four in the morning grudgingly going over ways I would have loved the premise if it had been executed differently was not a good time. This book was a really good idea begging for a more skilled treatment. It felt like the movie adaptation of a favorite book, where great ideas, a potentially intriguing universe, and characters with compelling potential are squandered into 90 minutes instead of getting the longer-format attention they deserved. The premise either required more pages or more focus to get an effective execution. As a bookseller, I will usually abandon an ARC I'm reading if it feels like it's not going anywhere and grabbing me, simply because I have so many other books I need to pay attention to so I can effectively talk about titles with readers. So I will say that the idea was compelling enough to encourage me to stick it out until the end in the hope that the tide would shift. At many junctures I saw ways in which it could redeem itself. Unfortunately, I would instead say that this title ends up being my least favorite book that I've finished not only this year, but in a really long time. It will go on my list of great disappointments of 2023.”

About Joma West

Joma West is a third culture writer whose work straddles both fantasy and science fiction. Growing up bouncing between countries has given her work a certain displaced flavor and you can see many African and Asian influences in her writing. Joma's novella, Wild, won the 2016 MMU novella award and her 2022 debut novel, Face, was met with acclaim. She lives in Glasgow.

Start a Book Club

Start a public or private book club with this book on the Fable app today!

FAQ

Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?

Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?

How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?

Do you sell physical books too?

Are book clubs free to join on Fable?

How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?

Error Icon
Save to a list
0
/
30
0
/
100
Private List
Private lists are not visible to other Fable users on your public profile.
Notification Icon
Fable uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB