Contemporary Middle Grade / 46K words
After their parents’ divorce, 12-year-old Elinor Jordan stayed with Mom in Maryland while her twin sister Genevieve moved with Dad to Illinois. Elinor doesn’t really understand why Genevieve wanted to move away, but if Gen doesn’t want to live with her, then she doesn’t want to live with Gen, either. Though they were once close, bookish honors student Elinor no longer has anything in common with artsy francophile Genevieve. They barely speak now–just like Mom and Dad.
While the girls are on their court-mandated spring break visit with their other parent, the entire family inadvertently ends up staying at the same resort. Mom and Dad aren’t happy about the coincidence…at first. But soon, they’re planning every activity together and looking like a love-struck couple straight out of a romantic comedy. Elinor and Genevieve know that if Mom and Dad get back together, it will ruin the perfect lives that the twins have built without each other. The girls agree to switch places for the week so they can stay with their preferred parent while keeping Mom and Dad apart. But while masquerading as each other, they realize they can’t continue to avoid confronting the rift in their relationship that caused Genevieve to move 600 miles away.
INSPIRATION
My 9-year-old twins are BFFs most of the time, but whenever one of them excels at something while the other struggles, I can’t help but think about how much it must suck sometimes to have a same-age sibling to constantly compare yourself to.
My twins are boy/girl, but I’ve always been obsessed with stories about identical twins. The Parent Trap is a cute movie, but…the parents are HORRIBLE PEOPLE, right? I wanted to write a story that was the inverse of The Parent Trap, more focused on the girls’ relationship, and had a more realistic (yet still over-the-top sappy) ending.