ECW Press, September 13, 2016.
Four Stars
Jessica has always admired her mother, Donna – she even
became a social worker to follow in her footsteps, helping underprivileged and damaged
children who are lost in the system. Now, Donna has just passed away, and
Jessica and her father are struggling to clean out the cluttered house. Underneath
the frostbitten packages of meat in the basement freezer, they make their most
gruesome discovery – the bodies of two teenage girls, foster sisters who lived
with the family and went missing in 1988.
Casey and Jamie Cheng were two troubled and wild
girls from Vancouver’s Chinatown. Growing up in the city’s dangerous Downtown
East Side, the girls struggled to cope with their overworked immigrant mother,
their alcoholic father, and Casey’s affair with a much older man. After a
violent crisis at home, the sisters are moved into Donna’s foster home, where
they act maliciously and try to sabotage Donna’s efforts to help them.
Through flashbacks, we see Jamie and Casey’s
upbringing, culminating in the reason they were taken from their home and
placed in the foster system. Although their behaviour towards Donna is
atrocious, it’s easy to see how it was caused by circumstances beyond their
control. The girls’ loving mother was doing her best to raise them, but her
struggle to put food on the table is the plight of many on the Downtown East
Side. Donna’s good intentions are representative of a social system that swallows
up girls like Casey and Jamie Cheng, without accounting for their differences.
Donna is of course the prime suspect for the deaths
of the Cheng sisters, especially since she claimed that she never saw them
again after they disappeared from her home. To clear her mother’s name, Jessica
embarks on an investigation of the Cheng’s past, and she ends up getting
romantically involved with the police detective, at the expense of her current
relationship. This side plot is a bit superfluous, but it does speak to Jessica’s
growth as she becomes more independent in the wake of her mother’s death.
The mystery of the girls’ disappearance propels the
novel forward, but it is not its main focus. The Conjoined is more about the characters’ development as they are
affected by topical social issues. It is also an exploration of our social
systems and their effects on disenfranchised people such as the Chengs – for
immigrant families, assimilation into foster care is not always a good solution.
It is often ineffective, and sometimes even harmful to the children’s
well-being. The Cheng sisters are removed from their mother’s care based on a
generic checklist that did not work in their favour, and as Jessica
investigates them through her work, she realizes that she is part of a broken
system.
The Conjoined is dark and uncomfortable, and it forces us to confront a bleak
chapter in Vancouver’s history – a time when women frequently went missing from
the Downtown East Side. The novel ended suddenly at a climactic moment, which underlines
the message that it doesn’t matter how the girls died – it matters why.
Although this is a mystery, especially as the Cheng sisters’ childhood connects
to Donna’s, it is most of all a well-crafted novel about people who feel real.
I received this book from ECW Press and NetGalley in
exchange for an honest review.
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