“ She’s in her fancy wedding-bra contraption and skimpy underwear that I’m aware—with some degree of sibling nausea—her dudebro fiancé, Dane, will positively destroy later. Her makeup is tastefully done and her fluffy veil is pinned in her upswept dark hair. It’s jarring. I mean, we’re used to looking identical while knowing we’re wholly different people inside, but this is something entirely unfamiliar: Ami is the portrait of a bride. Her life suddenly bears no resemblance to mine whatsoever.”

The work’s opening scene introduces Olive’s narrative voice and sharply observant nature. Lauren has Olive call Dane a “dudebro,” which quickly establishes that she is not especially fond of him, while showcasing her wit. The authors choose this moment to establish that Olive and Ami are twins—they establish this central fact by having Olive reflect on her life, not merely by having her state it. Ami is a “portrait” an artwork, while Olive is, by implication, far less put-together and certain of what her future holds. This contrast, so key to the novel’s themes, is neatly established early on.

“And it’s clear the self-fulfilling prophecy works in both directions: From the moment I watched myself picking my nose behind a piece of grimy plexiglass on the six o’clock news, my luck never really improved. I’ve never won a coloring contest or an office pool; not even a lottery ticket or a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. I have, however, broken a leg when someone fell backward down the stairs and knocked me over (they walked away unscathed), consistently drew bathroom duty during every extended family vacation for a five-year stretch, was peed on by a dog while sunbathing in Florida, have been crapped on by innumerable birds over the years, and when I was sixteen I was struck by lightning—yes, really—and lived to tell the tale (but had to go to summer school because I missed two weeks of classes at the end of the year).”

Olive, with some wryness, connects her childhood mishap to her entire life trajectory. She was once “picking her nose” on the evening news— an image that highlights her awkwardness. Her catalogue of mishaps establishes that,, in her own eyes, she remains ridiculous, doomed by forces outside her control to experience humiliation, pain, and suffering. She sees herself, in a sense, as trapped by her history, not as a person who has power to react to circumstances or shape them. This insistence on the power of fate will come to dominate all of Olive’s relationships, so her