MY NAME WAS EDEN

When a teenage girl is revived after nearly drowning, she insists on being called by a new name. Is it trauma—or is she possessed by the spirit of her dead twin?

When Lucy Hamilton’s daughter, Eden, is pulled from a nearby lake in the English countryside, it looks like the worst has happened—until she begins to breathe again. But while still in the hospital, she starts to insist that her name is Eli, which was the name of her unborn brother lost to vanishing twin syndrome. When Lucy and James bring their child home, she cuts her hair, begins to dress more androgynously, and continues to insist that her name isn’t Eden. On one hand, Lucy is relieved, because her relationship with her child has been combative for some time, and this new incarnation is sweet and demonstrative; on the other, she’s concerned, understandably, about what’s really going on. James has no time for this drama; he’s super busy with work (and maybe an affair?) and then his mother dies in a fall down the stairs. Then a boy from Eden’s school is hit by a car. Across these spikes of action, Lucy is also dealing with her own repressed childhood trauma. The strangest thing about this novel is that, despite the title, Barker-White never directly writes in the voice or perspective of Eden, focusing primarily on Lucy as narrator with an occasional chapter dedicated to Charlie, Eden’s best friend. Instead, we are left to try to solve an unsolvable mystery, with insufficient clues and a twist at the end that offers no clarity. The other discomfiting thing is that we are offered a character who seems to identify as male, totally out of sync with his female body, and we are asked to consider this strange and even villainous. At one point Charlie asks whether Eden “want[s] to actually be a boy,” but Eden rebuffs the question; it seems tone deaf not to explore this possibility more directly.

Some interesting exploration of the “evil twin” cliche, but ultimately too ambiguous.