The Foursome

Multiple friends had told me to read this. Truthfully, I don’t read a ton of historical fiction (I tend to enjoy it more when it’s a dual timeline), but the premise for this piqued my curiosity immediately. The true story of the conjoined twins from Siam, Eng and Chang Bunker, and the Yates sisters who married them. It was fascinating. The book spans five decades of their family’s life on a plantation in nineteenth-century North Carolina, from the 1830s through the Civil War and the years afterward. We meet Sarah (Sallie) and Adelaide (Addie) as headstrong teenage girls, intrigued by these wealthy, well-traveled, sophisticated twins. Addie sees an opportunity, while Sallie is more uncertain. The book carries us through fifty years, through love, loss, and war. It’s heartbreakingly sad at times, infuriating at others, but ultimately unputdownable. The book is clearly very well researched. I cannot even imagine how much work went into that, and giving this family’s story proper justice. The storytelling is beautiful: you really feel like you are back in the nineteenth century. I still can’t believe it’s all true.