To the outside world, she's Eve. Eve's twin sister Gen was kidnapped age 2. Her mother had a mental breakdown and refuses to accept reality, so her father decided to train Eve to act as both herself and her twin to keep her mum happy. At home, she's both Eve and Gen.

The blurb alone was wild enough for me to really want to love this book!

The story gets even wilder when Gen is found alive, now going under a different name. Her mother reacts badly to this, but at least Eve doesn't have to play Gen anymore. Eve's twin starts getting closer to Eve and wants to visit and meet her bio family in person. What should be a happy time turns into well, a quiet unraveling, because Gen refuses to go away...

Wow

What did I just read??? I have no words, this novel is amazing. I read in one sitting (seriously, cancel all your plans). The chapters are short and straight-to-the-point. An absolutely page turner with an incredible ending.

The Quiet Unraveling of Eve Ellaway follows the life of Eve, a teenage girl whose twin sister was kidnapped as an infant. This alone is enough to challenge even the strongest teenager, but Eve has the extra challenge of having to live inside her mother's delusions. When her twin was kidnapped, Eve's mother had a mental breakdown and cannot see reality. So, Eve has the heavy burden of being both twins for her mother, taking on two personalities with all of their hobbies and differences until Eve's own reality begins to shatter.

Hooyenga carefully and delicately approaches the nuance around mental illness and captures the voices of teenagers at those all important crossroads of their lives. She does it while finding slivers of humor in all the dark places. The Quiet Unraveling of Eve Ellaway will unravel you until you're questioning what is real, what is imagined, and what's the farthest you'd be willing to go to find yourself.

Huge thanks to the author, publisher, and netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this fantastic novel.

***Thanks to NetGalley for providing me a complimentary copy of THE QUIET UNRAVELING OF EVE ELLAWAY by Melanie Hooyenga in exchange for my honest review.***

3.5 STARS

What a wild premise. At age two months Gen Ellaway is kidnapped while her twin Eve sleeps. Because the twins’ recluse mother couldn’t deal with the loss of Gen, their father convinces her that Eve is both twins. This continues for eighteen years unbeknownst to Eve’s mother. Then things become complicate with the discovery of Gen, named Sky by her adoptive parents.

Set aside the fact that the cure for mental illness is not having a child play her missing/presumed dead twin and what type of Mengelian husband does that to his wife and child—the situation is absurd and disturbing.

I had a bit of difficulty following when Eve was Eve and Eve was pretending to be Gen and when Eve thought she was talking to her ghost twin. Eve was a difficult character to embrace. I couldn’t understand why she was so cold and standoffish to Sky.

Hoovenga’s writing, while adequate, didn’t evoke feelings in places where my heart should have palpitated or seized in suspense.

I did enjoy THE QUIET UNRAVELING OF EVE ELLAWAY, just not enough to bump to four stars.