LIAR'S DICE

A 12-year-old girl struggles to come of age in the wake of personal tragedy in 1970s Brazil.

“They took Mita away in the month of Ruby, and now we are in Sapphire.” Dolores Hamilton keeps time using her beloved birthstone calendar, marking off the days since her parents sent her identical twin sister, Mita, who has cerebral palsy and epilepsy, to live at a hospital in their father’s native England. Since Mita’s departure, Dolores and her parents have moved from their small town of Santanésia, Brazil to the high society of Rio de Janeiro. Dolores has had no formal schooling and can’t read or write, and now she’s sent to the British school against her will. There she tries to find her place among girls who whisper about her behind her back and teachers whose cruelty is only thinly veiled. Dolores’ desperation to express her feelings about the loss of her sister is hindered by her inability to write; nor can she speak of Mita with her parents, who turn away from any mention of their missing daughter. The loss of Mita is made all the more gut-wrenching as scenes from the twins’ childhood in Santanésia are woven throughout the novel. In Rio, Dolores slowly finds community through a new friend, Andrea, and a sympathetic teacher who helps her learn to write. Now Dolores can send letters to Mita, but when months go by without a response, she vacillates between worrying that Mita hates her or, perhaps worse, has forgotten her. Faithfull seamlessly blends Dolores’ personal journey with an occasionally scathing portrayal of life in Brazil in the 1970s, particularly through the story of Sofia, a trans sex worker who befriends Dolores. While Faithfull’s novel is filled with multilayered characters—with the exception of Dolores’ mother, who sometimes falls flat—it is Dolores’ reckoning with the loss of her other half that is the heartbeat of the novel: “Now, when I look in the mirror, I just see me. It used to be Mita there, looking back at me. So much has changed.”

Poignant, fresh, and often devastating.