Poppy wants to go to college like everyone else, but her father has other ideas. Ever since her twin sister, Lola, mysteriously vanished, Poppy’s father has been depressed and forces her to stick around. She hopes she can convince Lola to come home, and perhaps also procure her freedom, by sending her twin a series of nineteen letters, one for each year of their lives.
"Dear Twin is the most terrifying book I’ve read in years. Addie Tsai has rendered a world blisteringly similar to the one we live in where acceptance of one’s biography and queerness does not come easy. Dear Twin is the story of twins, the story of desire, the story of writing, and most importantly the story of eyes and bodies. It is rare that a book is as equally horrifying as it is beautiful, rigorous as it is readable, quiet as it is spectacular, but that is just what Tsai has created in Dear Twin. I have never read anything quite like it." —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy, Long Division, and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
"It’s clear that in this deeply personal young adult novel, fictionalized in part from the bones of her own memoir, Tsai hopes to reach certain young adults—those who identify at a core level with her pansexual, Asian-and-white, daughter-of-a-first-gen-immigrant narrator." —Sarah Sheppeck, The Coachella Review
"Dear Twin is an emotional, unique experience. Tsai’s exploration of queer identity, family, and adolescent ennui—paired with prose that’s both deft and inventive—will leave a lasting impression, especially on your heart. Through her dissection of the relationship between twins Poppy and Lola (who goes missing), Tsai weaves a heart-wrenching, raw, and sometimes obscure tale of the search for oneself in the chaos of a world that constantly tries to define us all." —John Corey Whaley, author of Where Things Come Back, Noggin, and Highly Illogical Behavior.
"Dear Twin explores many narrative components 'mainstream' fiction has often neglected to discuss, from the realities of a being a twin beyond the stereotypes, to the discussion of what it means to be queer and Asian in our society." —Lambda Literary
"As a Young Adult novel, Dear Twin has elements that draw fans to the genre—romance, found family, and individuation, for example—but what it does especially well is looking intimately into the painful parts of being a teen who has little support." —Yvonne Su, LibroMobile
Addie Tsai teaches courses in literature, creative writing, dance, and humanities at Houston Community College. She collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. Addie holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. Her writing has been published in Banango Street, The Offing, The Collagist, The Feminist Wire, Nat. Brut., and elsewhere. She is the Nonfiction Editor at The Grief Diaries and Senior Associate Editor in Poetry at The Flexible Persona.
