Sometimes I read a book that makes me both love and hate it simultaneously. It is an emotional book that can make me ill. It is something that I both understand on a miniscule level and one where I can not understand it at all. Identical by Leah Hayes (read via an online reader, due mid September 2026) is one of those books.
All my love goes to the minimal illustrations, as the story is too sad and thoughtful to think about. Things are artistic, straightforward, and with many twists and turns you get dizzy. It is an emotional read; you take away from it what you put into it. No two readers read the same piece of literature. It is a piece of literature that one could read a couple times without getting all the pieces.
Yet, it is deceptively simple. A woman wants to have a baby, she is unable to due to “having the womb but not the eggs.” But she finds a place that says they can help her. The result is an implanted egg, one that will become something different. The catch is, they implanted her with a “real egg” and an AI egg, thinking neither would survive. The results are twins. The rest of the story is one of the twins telling their story. The results well, you will get the ones that your bias and experiences will give you.
For certain, I am going to look for other books by Hayes. I recently located an online copy of I Touched the Sun that was not complete, but one could read most of the pages in the “images” section. The style of Hayes is abstract, but also realism. It is what I call realistic fantastical: no magic, but not really 100% “real” either. With Sun though, this picture book is pretty cozy, straightforward and we understand the concept of “sun within us all.” But, while I know other authors that I could say Identical reminds me of, it is not exactly like anything else I have read.
