Life can be alienating.

Adaptation tampers with the twins in this penultimate instalment of The Crooked Little Pieces: an edition that seals both into unnatural habitats.

Domesticity daunts Anneliese as she enjoys (endures?) a liberating love. Across an ocean unfamiliar faces shun the shrinking soul of Isabel. Belligerently climbing up the academic ladder, Susanna hangs up her psychiatrist spurs to be reached… never. Homelessness becomes a state of mind and mischief seems amiss until a road trip tilts predictability.

An interlude of dire longing, The Crooked Little Volume 6 confines its heroines to safety destined not to a test for feuding selves.

My Review

We have now reached the crossroads I referred to in my review of Volume 5. The year is 1963. Isabel is married to billionaire Tally and living in California. She is the headmistress of a girls school. She is trying hard to ensure her principles are maintained in the face of all that money.

In the UK, twin sister Anneliese is in a relationship with Stuart, but he is already married, though an expected tragedy will change all that. Stuart is in the police, and Anneliese is still ‘treating’ philanderer Charles Antony, who inadvertently feeds her with information for Stuart. The sisters haven’t seen each other for over three and a half years.

We don’t see Susanna until the end, when Anneliese visits Isabel and they go on a road trip. We don’t see Richard at all, but Isabel has decided to convert to Judaism, even though it’s Richard who is Jewish, not Tally. I didn’t really understand why. Hopefully it will come together in the final instalment.

I felt Volume 6 was more of a link between 5 and the final denouement. I look forward to reading it, though I will miss the sisters.

Many thanks to the author for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

About the Author

Sophia Lambton became a professional classical music critic at the age of seventeen when she began writing for Musical Opinion, Britain’s oldest music magazine. Since then she has contributed to The Guardian, Bachtrack, musicOMH, BroadwayWorld, BBC Music Magazine and OperaWire, and conducted operatic research around the world for The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography, which was published to coincide with the soprano’s one hundredth birthday in December 2023.

Crepuscular Musings – Lambton’s cultural Substack – provides vivid explorations of tv and cinema together with reviews of operas, concerts and recitals sophialambton.substack.com.

The Crooked Little Pieces is her first literary saga. This is volume 5. She lives in London.