Double Act

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

'We're the stars of this show, and we're always going to be Double Trouble.'

Ruby and Garnet are ten-year-old twins. They're identical, and they do EVERYTHING together, especially since their mother died three years earlier - but they couldn't be more different.

Bossy, bouncy, funny Ruby loves to take charge, and is desperate to be a famous actress. Meanwhile quiet, sensitive, academic Garnet loves nothing more than to curl up with one of her favourite books.

And when everything around the twins is changing so much, can being a double act work for ever?

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

We're twins. I'm Ruby. She's Garnet. We're identical. There's very few people who can -tell us apart. Well, until we start talking. I tend to go on and on. Garnet is much quieter That's ~ because I can't get a word in edgeways. We are exactly the same height and weight. I eat a bit more than Garnet. I love candy, and I like salty things too. I once ate thirteen bags of potato chips in one day. All salt-and-vinegar flavor. I love lots of salt and vinegar on french fries too. French-fried potatoes are my special weakness. I go munch munch munch gulp and they're gone. So then I have to scarf some of Garnet's. She doesn't mind. Yes I do. I don't get fatter because I run around more. I hate sitting still. Garnet will sit hunched over a book for hours, but I get the fidgets. We're both good at running, Garnet and me. At our last intramural sports day at school we beat everyone, even the boys. We came in first. Well, I did, actually. Garnet came in second. But that's not surprising, seeing that I'm the oldest. We're both ten. But I'm twenty minutes older. I was the bossy baby who pushed out first. Garnet came second. We live with our dad and our grandmother. Dad often can't tell us apart in the morning at breakfast, but then his eyes aren't always quite open. He just swallows black coffee as he jumps into his clothes and then dashes off for his train. Dad works in an office in London and he hates it. He's always tired out when he gets home. But he can tell us apart by then. It's easier in the evening. My braids are generally coming undone and my T-shirt's probably stained. Garnet stays as neat as a pin. That's what our grandmother says. Gran always used to have pins stuck all down the front of her cardigan. We had to be very careful when we hugged her. Sometimes she even had pins sticking out of her mouth. That was when she did her dressmaking. She used to work in this exclusive boutique, pinning and tucking and sewing all day long. Then, after ... Well, Gran had to look after us, you see, so she did dressmaking at home. For private customers. Mostly very large ladies who wanted the latest fashions. Garnet and I always got the giggles when we peeped at them in their underwear. Gran made all our clothes too. That was awfuL It-was bad enough Gran being old-fashioned and making us have our hair in braids. But our clothes made us a laughingstock at school, though some of the mothers said we looked a perfect picture. We had frilly dresses in summer and dinky pleated skirts in winter, and di-an knitted tooangora boleros that -made us itch, and matching sweaters and cardigans for the cold. Twinsets. And a very silly set of twins we looked too. But then Gran's arthritis got worse. She'd always had funny fingers and a bad hip and a trick knee. But soon she got so she'd screw up her face when she got up or sat down, and her fingers swelled sideways and she couldn't make them work. She can't do her dressmaking now. It's a shame, because she loved doing it so much. But there's one Amazing Advantage. We get to wear store-bought clothes now. And because Gran can't really make it on the bus into town, we get to choose. Well ... Ruby gets to choose. I choose for both of us. T-shirts. Ilights. Jeans. Matching ones, of course. We still want to look alike. We just want to look normal. Excerpted from Double Act by Jacqueline Wilson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

An unexceptional mix of familiar plot devices, this British import is almost gratingly obvious. Ten-year-old twins Ruby and Garnet take turns narrating, and although their voices aren't especially different, they are meant to be opposites. Ruby is outgoing, Garnet shy; Ruby leads, Garnet follows. Their mother has died long ago, and now their father has a girlfriend, whom they immediately reject. The four move from the city to the country, where the twins are desperately unhappy. Serious issues, like the burdens of twinhood and the difficulties of forging independent identities, become lost amid a surfeit of frothy subplots, including an audition for a TV show and a plan to enter a ritzy boarding school. The narration is frequently cloying, as in Ruby's comments about her father's taste for classic literature: "If we have a look at Dad's book we wonder what the Dickens they're about and they seem very Hardy, but Dad likes them." The brittle nature of Wilson's (Elsa, Star of the Shelter) writing finds its extension in her glib resolution of the conflicts, and the illustrations, rendered as if by Ruby and Garnet, are as flat and unrevealing as the story. Ages 9-12. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

Gr 3-6-Ten-year-old identical twins Ruby and Garnet do everything together but discover that this isn't necessarily the best thing as they deal with their widower father's remarriage and their own underlying rivalry. The entertaining journal kept by the girls, with numerous black-and-white cartoon drawings and distinguishing typefaces, reads like a conversation. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Gr. 3^-6. Ruby and Garnet are identical on the outside but quite different on the inside, as their entries in their combined journal show. Ruby is the bossy, confident one; Garnet the meeker, always ready to follow Ruby's lead. But neither of the British 10-year-olds is happy when their father decides to move the family to a country village to open a bookshop with his girlfriend, Rose--Rosey Ratbag to the twins. This is a book that gets it all right. Ruby and Garnet are characters with whom readers will identify, for everyone has been either the leader or the follower in a relationship. Kids will also recognize the anger that rises in the girls when they are forced to leave all that's familiar to them to move somewhere they don't want to go with someone they don't want to be with. On the other hand, youngsters will also comprehend Rose's frustrations as she tries every way she knows to get through to the unfriendly, unhappy girls. But this is not just a story of familial angst. It is also very, very funny. The clever design interposes the often laugh-aloud journal entries with sharp ink drawings that capture emotions with economy of line. (The obviously redone-for-an-American-audience dust jacket is the only misstep--too sweet.) Recommend the tale to kids who like Cleary--Wilson, too, knows how to mix messages with plenty of fun. --Ilene Cooper

Horn Book Review

Few people can tell ten-year-old twins Ruby and Garnet apart: Well, until we start talking, as Ruby writes in the journal the girls share. Outgoing, bossy Ruby leads; shy Garnet follows. When their widowed father and his girlfriend buy a bookstore in the country, the move precipitates changes in the twins' relationship. Economical line drawings reinforce the book's funny, sharply realized characters and realistic tone. From HORN BOOK Fall 1998, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus Book Review

From Wilson (The Suitcase Kid, 1997, etc.), a lightweight British import that is a telling study of twindom's trials and tribulations. Doing their best to make everyone miserable in the process, ten-year-old identical twins Ruby and Garnet reluctantly adapt to changes in their family and themselves in this revealing double journal. As close in other ways as twins can be, Ruby is otherwise as rude and bossy as Garnet is shy and wimpy. Ruby doesn't like Rose, the new woman in their father Richard's life, nor his decision to move to a small town and open a bookshop, nor their new teacher, nor their classmates, so Garnet trails along on a campaign of pranks and bad behavior, offering only token resistance. Then the twins, at Ruby's instigation, take an entrance exam for an expensive boarding school and only Garnet is offered a scholarship. Wilson works with abroad brush, exaggerating the differences in the twins' personalities, and endowing Rose and Richard with inhuman funds of patience. While readers will spend most of the book wondering why Ruby wasn't strangled long ago, she takes the impending separation from her twin so much harder than Garnet that she becomes a tragic figure. In the end, the two part with hugs and tears, and start making new friends almost immediately. Their alternating accounts--Ruby's long and chatty, Garnet's short but eloquent--are illustrated with simple black-and-white drawings, each twin done by a different artist, to no distinguishable effect. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.