The In-Between by Barbara Stewart (review)

Ellie and her family are moving to a distant town, and fourteen-year-old Ellie is ready for a new life, leaving behind her social ostracism and suicide attempt. On the way there, however, they suffer a terrible accident that changes Ellie’s life. When she first awakes after her head injury, she finds that her mother has died, leaving her alone with her depressed father; it’s then that Ellie meets Madeline, the beautiful, fiercely loyal friend who becomes Ellie’s everything. A later awakening, however, reveals that experience to have been only Ellie’s hallucinated perception in her brain-injured state: it’s actually Ellie’s mother who survived, not her father. Madeline, however, returns to be Ellie’s mainstay and more (“She completes me”), and Ellie realizes that Madeline is actually Ellie’s twin, who disappeared in utero; as Madeline’s actions become dangerous, however, Ellie begins to spiral down into isolation and self-destruction. Mood and style make this story: Stewart keeps readers off-balance, never pinning Madeline down as either a supernatural presence or a product of Ellie’s disordered mind; to Ellie, Madeline is absolutely real, while the rest of the world sees Madeline’s destructive actions—assaulting one of Ellie’s friends, for instance—as Ellie herself in the grip of something troubling. Madeline’s seductive, insistent pull on Ellie is deeply creepy, and there’s an additional disturbing layer as Ellie’s excuses for Madeline’s behavior begin to sound like those of an abused lover (“She’s not trying to be mean, but someday everyone will see that I’m a fake”). There’s an inventive touch in the culmination, which involves Ellie’s mother’s current pregnancy (again twins, with one lost prior to birth) and which will have readers tensely guessing as to Ellie’s self-destruction or survival. Somewhere between Dead Ringers and Suma’s 17 & Gone (BCCB 3/13), this is a dark and uneasy psychological tale that delivers just the disturbance readers are looking for.