One

Grace and Tippi are conjoined twins. After spending their whole lives tucked away at home, their parents’ financial issues mean that they are going to have to start attending school. Private school, but all the same: it’s the outside world.

The outside world isn’t kind to the different.

Most of it, anyway.

Yasmeen, who has HIV and her best friend Jon treat Grace and Tippi like they’re actual people rather than a walking tragedy. They invite them to join their adventures without hesitation. They are the first friends Grace and Tippi have ever had, except for their sister, Dragon.

But something is looming. A decision that could tragically alter everything. A choice after which nothing will ever be the same.

Fair Warning: this is the sort of book you need to set aside a few hours for, because once you start reading, you won’t want to stop until you get to the end. The entire novel is written in non-rhyming verse, which makes it a really quick read, and it’s so atmospheric that putting it down to simply boil the kettle is disorientating.

One, by Sarah Crossan, aside from being the most beautiful piece of fiction I have read in a long time, is basically a mission statement for why we need more diverse books. Because, to be totally honest, outside of adverts for exploitative-looking documentaries, the experience of being a conjoined twin is one I’ve never even thought about.

And I’m the but what about disabilities? person.

The whole thing is told from the perspective of Grace. I really like that Crossan chose to only have one of the twins narrate. I think it conveyed really effectively the experience of the conjoined life Grace and Tippi shared. Together but separate. We got to see how much they loved each other, but also their differences, and the resentments that sprung from them. There’s this one scene where Tippi accepts a cigarette from Yasmeen, and Grace is totally mad at her for it. But it’s not all about resentment. Grace and Tippi’s lives feature a good deal of loving compromise. Grace loves to bake and Tippi doesn’t, but they bake all the time anyways.

This book totally challenged my perceptions. One of the first questions Grace and Tippi are continually asked is why they didn’t get separated. No matter the extreme dangers involved and that both girls would have to use wheelchairs for the rest of their lives (shared legs), if they survived at all. As far as we, the rest of singleton society is concerned, a conjoined twin must long to be separate.

Reading this book make me think a lot about the paradigms I experience life through. It made me think about what it even means to be an individual, and how tied up my self-worth is with that. Individuality remains a prize so many of us are competing for.

Not Grace and Tippi. Grace and Tippi don’t want to be separate. They are more than best friends… they are each other’s worlds. They couldn’t imagine life any other way. They wouldn’t want to.

‘Plato claimed that

We were all joined to someone else once,’ I say.

‘We were humans with four arms

and four legs,

and a head of two faces,

but we were so powerful

we threatened to topple the Gods.

So they split us from our soul mates

               down the middle,

and doomed us to live

forever

without our counterparts.’

If the point of reading is to experience new worlds, then I don’t see how any bookworm could bear not to pick up One at the nearest opportunity. It’s a beautiful story of love and identity that’ll crack your heart in two.

One is the sort of story that you just can’t shake, even weeks after you finish reading it.