Regina's Song
by David Eddings and Leigh Eddings

Published by the Ballantine Publishing Group
copyright 2002 by David and Leigh Eddings

I greatly enjoyed this book. It's a little eerie and a little odd but it makes you think much more than your usual fantasy novel. The authors did a wonderful job with the different psychological themes as well and the disorders I looked up later to learn about seemed to be portrayed accurately. Regina and Renata Greenleaf are identical twins, so close in looks that not even their mother can tell them apart. Even their closest friends have never heard them use singular pronouns to refer to themselves, only "we" and "our". Sometimes they speak to eack other in their private twin language that nobody else understands and they are rarely separate from each other for long. People, including their parents, have started calling them "Twink" or "Twinkie" and refering to them collectively as "the Twinkie Twins".

The "Twinkie Twins" are happy high school students when tragedy strikes. After a party on an abandoned road near the petting zoo, their car breaks down. One twin goes in search of a telephone. The other waits for a short while before going to look for her sister. They are found in the morning; one twin brutally raped and murdered, the other whispering incoherantly in twin speak. The hospital footprint records are missing and there is no way to tell the dead twin from the living one, who doesn't seem to understand anything that's going on around her.

Their parents decide to call the live twin "Renata" but theirs no way to tell for sure. Renata doesn't know anyone or anything and continues to talk in twin speak. Still grieving for the loss of one daughter and the loss of the other's sanity, they send Renata to a private mental hospital. Then one day, Renata starts speaking understandable english again but she doesn't know who she is, doesn't remember that she ever had a twin, and doesn't even recognize her parents. She only knows Mark, the older neighbor boy who was like a big brother to the twins and gave them their nickname.

Mark does everything he can to aid in Renata's recovery but it is a slow process and she seems to be heading for a relapse. At the same time, rapists are being found murdered all over the area. Could Renata's behavior have anything to do with these unsolved murders? Mark has suspicions. One night he hides outside of her house and witnesses something he could never have dreamed of.



Other books by David and Leigh Eddings

The Redemption of Althalus

The Belgariad
The Malloreon Belgarath the Sorcerer

Polgara the Sorceress

The Rivan Codex

The Elenium
The Tamuli