The Trouble With Twins Review + Buttery Shortbread Cookies Recipe
Meet The Trouble With Twins, a Marvelous Middle-Grade Sure to Win Your Heart!
Synopsis:Imagine twin sisters, Arabella and Henrietta, nearly identical, yet with nothing in common. They're the best of friends...until the day they aren't. Plain and quiet Henrietta has a secret plan to settle the score-- she does something outrageous, and she can't take it back. When the deed is discovered, Henrietta is quickly banished, and two unexpected journeys are set in motion.
If Jane Austen and Lemony Snicket penned a middle-grade book together it would look and read a heck of a lot like The Trouble With Twins.
It’s an adorably absurd story featuring:
• A tandem bicycle
• An Assistant Principal with a great unrequited love for the school librarian
• A haircut gone horribly wrong
• An agoraphobic washed-up actress
• A creaky, shadowy, chilly, house full of cats
The Trouble With Twins has the feel of a much-beloved fairytale or fable. The quirky characters and the plot--simple enough to keep even small readers entertained yet substantial enough to please older children, teens and adults-- is buoyed up by Kathryn Siebel’s zippy prose. The story is actually told as a story. Much like William Goldman’s classic The Princess Bride the story is ‘interrupted’ by comments from the reader and the listener. In the case of The Trouble With Twins, it’s a mother telling the tale to her daughter.
What would be a fairytale-esque story like this without pictures? Enchanting illustrations drawn by artist Julia Sarda take up many pages. Teeming with whimsy they depict the dual journey of the sisters and the adventures (and misadventures) they get into.
Siebel masterfully crafts a world that is both familiar yet unusual and isn’t boxed into one particular era. There’s a timelessness to The Trouble With Twins and an abundance of universal themes that make this sure to become a middle-grade classic. It's a cheeky comedy of manners that glitters with hilarity, hijinks, and heartfelt sentiments.
No doubt about it, The Trouble With Twins is one of the most marvelous middle-grade books on shelves today. Henrietta and Arabella are both delightful leads (but in different ways) and have such charm about them that I still look back on this book and smile! The hilarity and humor in this novel are as bright and shiny as a diamond, and just as precious! There is so much value and so much to love about The Trouble With Twins. Chock-full of campy and quirky characters with stylish prose that has the cheeky elegance of comedy of manners novels, and a plot that, while most unusual, doesn’t stray too far from the realm of possibility and believability.
Highly Recommended
If you enjoyed this you may also enjoy: The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place by Maryrose Wood, Horton Halfpott by Tom Angleberger, The Unintentional Adventures of the Bland Sisters by Kara LaReau
Inez's Buttery Shortbread Cookies!
In The Trouble With Twins Inez, a kindly bookshop owner, takes Henrietta under her wing when she moves in with her crabby and dour great-aunt. Lounging on cushy furniture with pristine new books, Inez offers Henrietta freshly brewed tea that tastes like lemons and honey and some buttery cookies to go with it.
The cookies, delicious as they are, make a nice break from trying to choke down the horrible fish-head stew Henrietta's Great Aunt Priscilla is so fond of. Inspired by shortbread tea biscuits, here are Inez's Buttery Shortbread Cookies!
Recipe adapted from Pretty Simple Sweet
Ingredients
1 cup all-purpose flour
pinch of salt
1 stick Earth Balance, softened at room temperature
1/3 cup cane sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
*sugar in the raw/raw sugar/turbinado sugar
* before baking the cookies in the oven, sprinkle some on top to add some pretty glitter/sparkle to them!
Let's Get Baking!
- In a small bowl stir together flour and salt
- In a larger bowl put the sugar and softened --not melted-- vegan butter
- Using a hand-held electric mixer whip the butter and sugar together until combined
- Add the vanilla
- Once mixed in, add the flour and continue to beat until it's combined. DO NOT OVERMIX. The cookies will be crumbly and tough!
- Smoosh the dough together into a disc and wrap it in wax paper or plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for 2 hours
- Let dough soften for a few minutes at room temp
- On parchment paper or wax paper or a flour coated surface using a small rolling pin OR your hands, press out the dough to medium thickness
- Preheat the oven to 350
- Line two tin baking trays with parchment paper
- Using small cookie cutters (2 or 3 inches in size) cut the dough into whatever cute shape you choose and carefully put them on the trays
- Smoosh the dough together and pat down again until you use up all the dough. You should get over a dozen little cookies.
- Put both trays in the fridge for 15 minutes , the extra chill time helps them hold their shape when you bake them
- Sprinkle on the raw sugar and then Bake the cookies for 8 to 10 minutes, until they're slightly golden at edges, they do spread a little bit so be sure they're not super super close
- Let cookies cool on tray for 10 minutes
- Move cookies to metal cooling rack to cool completely to room temperature
- Store cookies in airtight plastic container in single layers with parchment paper to prevent breaking
- Brew some tea and enjoy!
Photos taken and styled by me.
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