Un couple bourgeois de Toronto passe par un processus difficile pour adopter un enfant après avoir vécu un deuil. Finalement, tout déboule: des jumeaux d’un an sont disponibles pour eux en Russie, il suffit de compléter les papiers et d’aller les chercher très rapidement. Une fois à la maison, le couple ne peut que remarquer que les jumeaux sont étranges, taciturnes, et ne s’attachent pas à eux. Et, au fil des années, ça devient pire. Bien pire.

C’est quand même rare que je tombe sur des romans québécois sombres, pour ne pas dire «horreur» qui soient aussi bien écrits. Celui-là aussi, je l’ai lu presque d’un coup, en moins de 24h. L’intrigue était solide jusqu’à la fin.

C'était mon Top 7 parmi mes lectures de 2020.
Je veux voir les autres livres du Top 10

3,5
Beaucoup aimé l'atmosphère et l'écriture. Toutefois, j'aurais aimé en savoir un peu plus...

Thank you to the publisher for this advanced reading copy. This book has a very interesting premise. French Canadians Emma and Gregory go to Russia to adopt twin baby boys from an orphanage and take them back to Toronto to live. From the moment this book started I knew that it would pack a punch as it was a short novel that was about a very sensitive subject (international adoption).

I read this book in a day as I was compelled to keep going to find out what was going to happening next in these characters lives. I found some of the scenes made me really uneasy and sometimes I wanted more explanation rather then to be rushed through. I do have to say that the ending was quite good and the book has me guessing throughout.

I picked this up because I love this shade of periwinkle so much but I’m glad I didn’t buy it because I don’t want this in my home!

It has an interesting premise— a couple adopts twins from Russia that turn out to be evil. This could go one of two ways, either a meditation on parenting violent children like We Need To Talk About Kevin or camp horror movie style like the Orphan. I could’ve accepted either or a blend, I’ve been reading a lot of books about having kids and the various downsides to different methods of building a family. But things would happen just for shock value and it started to become silly, but it was still trying to be serious so the shocking bits didn’t come off as campy.

Emma has a realization when the babies are young that because they are always looking at the other one, they think that they ARE the other. I’m no expert on child development, but I think that for several months the baby does not realize that the mother is a separate entity. It takes a long time to develop a sense of self. It makes sense that the twins, who didn’t have a mother during a critical period of development, would have their wires crossed. It reminded me of a riddle I heard as a kid: two sisters are looking at each other. One has a dirty face and one has a clean face. The one with the clean face washes her face. Why does she do it? The answer is that they are twins so when they look at each other the other’s face serves as a reflection, so she assumes that if the twin’s face is dirty her own face is dirty. The boys each see the other twin as their own self.

The twins get some perspective chapters and they are written using “we” pronouns because they behave as one entity. This was pretty cool actually. It becomes clear that there is more discord between the brothers than we are initially led to believe, which is interesting to figure out because it is not delineated which twin is speaking/thinking. This unraveling could have been very interesting as we see their sense of self fracture, but it just didn’t work. Eventually we discover that they are not even twins at all, the adoption agency lied!

The book is justifiably critical of the adoption industry. The boys come home experiencing alcohol withdrawal and it’s clear the orphanage was using alcohol to subdue the children. The agency is no help when they ask about this. It’s also critical of those who choose international adoption. Emma wants to exotify Russia and she constantly expresses disappointment when things are similar to her life in Toronto. She expected it to be cold and dismal in Moscow and is surprised to find the weather is nicer there than when they left Toronto. She’s disappointed that their trolley cars look the same as at home, and that the people on the train platform are just regular people. I wonder what she expected to find, some exotic otherworld? To save the children?

In the end, Gregory and Emma give the twins up to foster care. It’s like they’re returning them to the store. I thought of that one youtube couple who returned their adopted autistic son. Of course, simplifying it like that is extremely unfair to Gregory and Emma. I'm not sure what most people would do if they had children as violent as Daniil and Vanya. There is obviously not enough support for parents of children who need extreme amounts of help. But this book doesn’t feel like a meaningful exploration of that difficult situation, it’s just a horror premise set up but it’s not well executed.

This concept has so much to explore. The ethics of adopting, the formation of identity. I just don’t think I've ever read anything that reads as awkwardly as this, both on a sentence level and the pacing overall. The shocking moments were ineffective. Why was there no consequence when Gregory slapped the toddler while Dwell magazine was doing a photoshoot? The name brand dropping was strange too, I get that they are upper middle class without that. The writing is stilted and odd and the dialogue is not believable. It could be a translation issue, because it sounds like the output of google translate instead of real sentences. Even so, the plot pacing is very uneven and I don’t think a different translator could’ve salvaged it. Disappointing.

Daniil and Vanya was fine. In what seems to be a common trope (Orphan, the Omen, the bad book I read a few years ago, the real life Orphan Natalia Barnett), Toronto couple Emma and Gregory decide to adopt twins from a Russian orphanage and pretty much from the moment they leave the orphanage, the twins bring increasingly more troubling and disturbing situations to the family, leading to a strain in the marriage and a growing sense of paranoia in Emma. When I say disturbing, I really mean it: some pretty explicit descriptions of a loss of a pregnancy, some scenes of self-harm, and when it comes to the twins, it starts small, with strange comments from the twins in their childhood, but progresses to some terrible and descriptive acts of torture and underage sex acts... yeah, it gets pretty bad! As I mentioned, this book was fine, but the writing and dialogue seemed wooden and clunky, perhaps due to the translation. The synopsis touts this as a combo of We Need to Talk About Kevin and Goodnight Mommy, but I’d recommend just reading/watching either of those instead. I did like this but there wasn’t much depth here. Also Emma was obsessed with mentioning the brand names or her clothes, household items, strollers... not sure what the point of this was but I assume there was one!

It’s a familiar story in the North American psyche, a culture of people who are perhaps too eager to adopt, snatching up the first child that becomes available, putting full trust in their adoption agency with reckless blindness towards the traumatic and toxic conditions of those unregulated orphanages: a bright-eyed couple adopts a child from Russia only to find that they suffer from reactive attachment disorder (read: a childhood-trauma-induced lack of empathy that exhibits similarly to sociopathy).

In this case of Toronto-based French-Canadians Emma and Gregory, their twins Daniil and Vanya, adopted from Russia at 15 months old, quickly exhibit signs that something isn’t quite right. In their desperation to build a happy family following the traumatic loss of a pregnancy, the couple attributes the twins oddities to the jarring shift in culture and to their sudden, ill-prepared thrust into parenthood.

Through a fast-paced 256 pages, readers experience Emma’s desperation, loneliness, and inevitable self-blame punctuated with brief, but oddly placed, narratives from a pubescent Daniil and Vanya that are eerily narrated from a first-person-plural perspective: “Our voice is sharp, with ridiculous accents. We’ve always hated it.” Their morphed voice further emphasizes to what extent the boys have cultivated an obsessive brotherly identity that shuns not only their parents but also their peers.

Though the writing is largely clunky and peppered with artificial dialogue (perhaps the result of an unsatisfactory translation), its daring venture into vulgarity and the impermissible topics of sadistic and sexual violence of minors urges the plot forward in an eager search for resolution and retribution. While the abrupt ending may not provide the closure sought (it certainly didn’t in my case), it did raise critical questions regarding the social responsibility of adoptive parents and the lasting, interpersonal effects of childhood trauma.

Daniil and Vanya is a book that can be read quickly, that has high shock value, and that will keep you thinking for a couple of days in its wake, but it’s far from life-changing and all too forgettable.

Thank you to NetGalley and Invisible Publishing for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.