This was literally one of the worst books I have ever read holy heck. For starters, the main character, Mary Lee, really should have been renamed Mary Sue. Mary Lee was perfect and could do no wrong; she loved her twin with all her heart, forgave her for her 'evil ways,' was entirely horrified by this and that, etc etc etc. The only thing imperfect about Mary Lee was that she was not good at not being a twin - for about five minutes at the beginning of the novel, where she didn't want to do things by herself. Of course, as soon as she decided she wanted to be popular and loved, she was. Smh.
Her sister Madrigal was of course the exact opposite, another equally flat character who was supposed to be perfectly evil. Madrigal and Jon Pear were just terrible - perfectly evil! Why, they stood and watched a man drown and laughed!! Oh no!!! and they never ever did anything nice ever!!!
The plot, as well, was,,,,, questionable. The novel starts out really weirdly, with twins who are 1 person, moves to Mary Lee deciding inexplicably to become Madrigal rather than just tell everyone that it was she who died, not Mary Lee, moving on to meeting the truly evil Jon Pear - how do we know he's evil? 1, because he drinks tears (???) and 2, because for a good time, he picks up students telling them he's going out partying and then *gasp* dumps them in the bad part of town and lets them walk home. In fact, that's what makes him evil - because all the bad things he does are super passive. wow. There are some weird hints of him calling the Winter Sleigh Festival the 'Winter SLAY festival,' but apparently his plan is to just... wait for someone to fall into the cold water and not save them from drowning....? omg!!! true horror!!! im scare!!!
Last but not least, the only thing that could have even possibly redeemed this novel, the writing style. It was terrible. The dialogue was stilted - in perfect tandem with the rest of the book, let it be noted. For this book, Cooney's goal seems to have been to never ever use even a single contraction. Everyone, including the teenagers, used incredibly formal and repetitive speech. This read as though it had been written by a 14 year old who thought that to write like an adult wrote as stiffly as possible and as though it hadn't been edited at all, frankly. Not impressed at all.
This is literally the longest review I have ever written for any book, ever, and let that stand as a testament to how truly non-impressive Twins is. eurgh.