Fiction by Emma Rous
Seraphine and Danny are called the Summerbourne twins, because they were born in the summer of 1992 and also because they were born on the old Summerbourne estate on the English countryside. But the village locals say that the estate is cursed by sprites who have decreed that twins can never survive there. Indeed there were two other sets of twins in the family’s recent past of whom only two ne survived past early childhood.
Although Seraphine and Danny have indeed lived to the age of twenty-five, the rumor is that this is because they aren’t the real Summerbourne twins. Their mother killed herself on the very day of their birth, after she’d delivered at home alone. There are no pictures from the first six months of their lives.
When their father dies unexpectedly, Seraphine finds a lone picture from the day she and Danny were born, showing their mother and father smiling with only one newborn baby. She can’t tell whether the baby is herself or her brother, but viewing the picture reminds her of all the rumors she’s heard during her life: that she or Danny was a changeling child and not a Summerbourne twin at all….
Seraphine decides to go looking for the one person alive who might know what really happened on the day of her birth: the au pair girl Laura who had been living with her family at the time. Maybe Laura can tell her the truth, she thinks.
This is a long and convoluted explanation of this book’s premise, and the eventual conclusion of the story was also confusing and difficult. It was interesting, but too over-the-top complicated.
