Reviewed by Hillary Moses Mohaupt

Sharon Harrigan's debut novel, Half, is about the half-truths we believe we understand as children, and the half-lies we might tell ourselves to survive a difficult youth. On the surface, the most striking thing about this novel is that it is told in a first-person plural voice, but even that is only half the truth. "As identical twins, we spoke in unison," explain Paula and Artis on the book's first page. "People responded to us, at least, as if we did." It's an important distinction to make, because this novel is as much about other people's perceptions as it is about what happens inside the girls' heads, both separately and simultaneously.

The book opens at the funeral of Paula and Artis's father, Moose, an event that has finally called the girls back to their hometown. At thirty years old, Paula and Artis have their own families and careers, but they are tethered together, as most siblings are, by their childhood memories. Their father's old hunting buddy approaches them after the funeral and accuses them of killing their father. Shocked, the girls escape outside to confer about their father's death and the life they lived with him as kids. To make sense of how they've arrived at their father's funeral, and how he's made them what they have become, they decide to review their early years, scene by scene, starting when they are five.

Through their remembrances, the reader is swept into a lower-middle-class Michigan household. Moose is a larger-than-life father who works first in a factory and then as a tow-truck driver; the girls' mother runs a daycare from the living room. The girls' first shared memory as five-year-olds is of listening to their parents making love (and, the reader understands, not completely comprehending what's happening). They believe their mother is in danger, which is not a huge leap, as we soon see that Moose liberally berates and beats Paula and Artis for seemingly insignificant reasons, leaves them in a snow fort one midwinter night, frightens them in the woods, forbids them from sleepovers with their friends, and, later, punishes the girls and their mother for a trip to an abortion clinic when one of the girls gets pregnant. Yet Paula and Artis are enthralled by Moose, a man who seems to be able to control the weather, spell every word in the dictionary, and, later, erase the viral online presence of the girls' teenage band when their fans become too obsessive and dangerous. They are disappointed on one of their birthdays when their father gives them a guitar to share and at another when he gives them one gun, instead of the hamster hotel they've seen in their parents' closet. Chance encounters with the woman with whom Moose has a brief affair, and seeing Moose at a restaurant with a much younger man, cause some confusion for the girls, but those experiences don't shake Moose's power over them. Paula and Artis half-worship, half-loathe their father, and thanks to Harrigan's careful, delicate storytelling, it becomes clear that it's really only half of the pair who believes Moose has the power to tell spring to begin, while the other half holds no such delusions and harbors real hatred for him.

When Paula and Artis leave home to attend college together at the University of Michigan, they share a room and discover a wider world where they can be themselves. Together, they make friends with Staver, a nonbinary person who introduces them to Colson and Sebastian, two boys who, like the girls, are bonded together by a difficult childhood. Paula and Artis pair off with the boys and eventually find their own career paths, one as a successful musician, the other in the military, each of them pursuing one-half of the future their father prepared them for.

As the girls tell their way back from the past, it becomes clear that while they shared clothes, toys, lip gloss, a gun, a guitar, and a dorm room, the sisters haven't always shared an opinion about their father; they haven't always agreed on shutting him out. But back in the wintry lee of the church, Paula and Artis face the fact that their father was not as immortal as everyone believed, but also bigger than they knew: "Now that we were almost twice that age, we finally saw how young we'd been. What babies we were when we started turning our backs on Dad, what unformed things when we had decided we already knew enough. Now we were sure of less and less, each minute we lingered here in the funeral snow." Without this shared enemy, the girls' collective voice finally breaks in two after years of tiny fractures.

The novel's last chapters are told in alternating first person singular, distinguishing two voices that the reader has gotten used to hearing in unison. Balancing both perspectives helps tease out what really happened during their early years and how they end up confronting their childhood fears, real or imagined or somewhere in between.

As teenagers, Paul and Artis are momentarily online video stars in a band called the Slutty Twins. "In the clips, we dressed almost alike, in jeans and sweaters. One loose, one tight. One virgin, one whore. The two twin states, mirror images, sullied and pure. Like the two of us, virtually identical." It's the "virtually" that reminds the reader that however close the girls are, they are two different people. It would have been easy for Half to depend on unimaginative tropes about twins, their fairy tale ability to mind-read and to swap places. But while the novel contains elements that might suggest the supernatural from time to time, Harrigan deftly complicates the easy binaries of good and evil, love and hate, innocence and guilt, engagement and estrangement. The girls are not always right or well-behaved, but neither are their parents or the men they marry. No one is a hero; no one is above scrutiny.

With deceptively spare prose that conceals complex ideas about identity, Harrigan's novel explores the fractions of ourselves we share with others in order to build our whole selves.