Half

In Harrigan’s unsettling debut novel (after the memoir Playing with Dynamite) identical twins contend with a complicated, abusive father. Artis and Paula, named for the Greek gods Artemis and Apollo, spend much of their childhood believing their father was something of a god or monster himself. Throughout their childhood and adolescence in Michigan, the girls respond to their father’s intense personality—including his physical and emotional abuse (“The two of you couldn’t add up to a boy”)—with a blend of fear and awe. Harrigan makes the personalities of Artis and Paula—who narrate the majority of the novel in first-person plural—deliberately indiscernible for much of the narrative, even after they leave for college in Ann Arbor, where they start dating boys; befriend a nonbinary classmate, with whom they discuss their plural identity; and fret over their mother, who still lives with their father. When the pair return home at age 30 for their father’s funeral, they discover a secret that will fundamentally alter their relationship, which Harrigan signals brilliantly by shifting the narration to alternating I’s. Harrigan’s bold stylistic choices and memorable voice lend the novel a sense of mystery and magic, well suited to its themes of childhood fears and adult disillusionment. Riveting and inventive, this is a cut above the average coming-of-age tale. (June)