I suspect this is going to be one of those love it or hate it literary novels that deserves a larger readership than it will get and might be put down early on by those who read the promotional material and expected something other than what it is. What it is is a very interesting, to me, story about a pair of twins- Daphne and Laurel- who worship language. It's told in the third person from a variety of perspectives, not only theirs but also that of their mother, their love interests, etc. This, I think, allows the reader to see them as others do-which is, to be honest, a little creepy in spots. This is about sisterhood, differences, prescription versus description, and most of all, the English language. A battle over a family dictionary? Yes, it can be engaging and its about more than the physical item. I learned some new words (awesome) and enjoyed the punning (which Schine, thankfully, kept manageable.). Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. Try this one- it's a great treat from a wonderful writer.

Two of Cathleen Schine’s slight comic novels have been filmed ("The Love Letter" and "Rameau’s Niece".).  Her frothy new novel, "The Grammarians," also seems destined for Hollywood. As light as a helium balloon, it flies up, up, and away before falling to the earth, sans gas. The mood is reminiscent of Maria Semple’s "Where’d You Go, Bernadette?", only with identical twin grammarians instead of a disillusioned architect.

Twins in novels and films are freaky, and the twins in "The Grammarians "are no exception. Daphne and Laurel, named after  Daphne, the daughter of a river god, and the laurel tree she turns into, speak their own baby language.  Later, they delight in reading the dictionary. Their obsession with words frightens their uncle Don, a psychiatrist whom they tease. He keeps expecting (or hoping for) a rift between these cute wordy geniuses. When the quarrel finally happens, it is a desperate battle to the death over grammar. True, I’ve seen fiercer arguments, but grammar angst dominates the psyches of upper-class New Yorkers.

Don’t we all secretly wish we were Patty and Cathy, identical cousins in "The Patty Duke Show"? What fun to change roles!  After graduation from Pomona, the twins share a slum apartment in New York:  Daphne is a receptionist for an alternative paper, Laurel an intimidated kindergarten teacher at a private school.  After they pull a “switcheroo” for a day and do each other’s jobs, they fix each other’s errors.  I expected them to trade jobs permanently.  

As time goes by, the two separate, as Uncle Don once predicted. Daphne, the sarcastic sister, becomes a grammar columnist (think The Comma Queen at "The New Yorker," or the late William Safire at "The New York Times) , while Laurel, the “nice” twin, stays home with her baby. But the good twin turns into the evil twin: desperately jealous of Laurel’s writing,  she adopts a contrarian “descriptive” theory of grammar (spoken language is correct and literary rules are needless ) and writes poems and stories based on ungrammatical letters written during World War I. Daphne is furious because she thinks Laurel has stolen her identity. Daphne, however, remains the most famous of the two.

 But Schine’s intellectual twins are caricatures, and they are not quite as smart as Schine thinks they are. They remember their high school Latin teacher reading “to them from Plutarch—the story of Romulus and Remus—in Latin.” That would be difficult, if not impossible, since  Plutarch wrote in Greek: Schine was thinking of Livy.   She also informs us that the girls laughed  over the names Romulus and Remus:  suckled by wolves,  they were named for the Latin word, "ruma," “teat.”  Actually, the standard Latin form is "rumis:." Livy is referring to Rumana, the goddess of nursing mothers., because Romulus is born under "ficus Rumanalis", the fig tree of Rumana.

"The Grammarians" is a fluffy beach book, and should do well in the women’s fiction market, because there is no style to interfere with story.   Schine writes like a copy-editor, with short sentences, simple vocabulary, and few adjectives and adverbs.

This is not to say you won’t enjoy it. Everybody likes to be entertained.  I look forward to seeing the responses of my grammarian friends.

Hm. Pleasant stuff, but where’s the beef? Schine is capable, comical, sentimental. Her concept is entertaining but somehow rather empty. Words, twins, family, life. It’s immersive but insubstantial.

"I thought you were going to say having a baby must be like having a twin."
"But a baby is a whole other person."
"I hate to keep harping on this, but so is your sister."
No, Daphne thought. My sister is me if I were different.

I was really excited to read The Grammarians based on the premise (and, let's admit it, the cover). I'm not sure why it fell a little flat for me - it was quick to read and clever at times, but perhaps tried to cover too much ground in such a small volume.

Spoilers below!

In The Grammarians, we meet identical twins Daphne and Laurel, sisters obsessed with the dictionary, and see them through basically their entire lives with very little room to breathe in the moment. While this book was written in the style of a biography, it may have had more impact told in the style of memoir - if we could have been dropped into the lives of the twins at any one of their life changing moments and stayed there to savor it, we may have grown to understand them better. Instead, we are rushed through actions before we understand the emotion behind them. The reader may feel that their rift feels artificial and unearned, even though the story of a sudden rift between identical twins has so much embedded metaphor.

I feel like there's a whole book to be found in their teenage years, their years as young roommates, their years as new mothers, the year after their rift, the year after their father's death. I enjoyed reading this, but wanted more from it - if you enjoy language, quick reads, and flawed characters, then I recommend it!

Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for a chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review!

<b><i>The Grammarians</i> is a tale of sisterhood and a love letter to the English language.</b> Cute, quirky, and highly readable, this book was a good deal of fun, especially for someone as word-obsessed as I am.

The blurb on this book is rather misleading, so I’m providing my own here. As children, Daphne and Laurel—red-haired identical twins—speak to each other in a pidgin language of their own creation, much to the bafflement of those around them. Their greatest delight comes from poring over an old dictionary their father brought home, hunting for interesting words and carrying them over into everyday life, while engaging in all sorts of shenanigans and thriving on the excitement of daily life. <i>The Grammarians</i> chronicles the lives of these two girls as they grow into adulthood, start careers, get married, and raise families, drifting further apart with time, but never losing their love for all things linguistic…or their innate connection with each other.

As one might expect, <b>where the book really excels is its use of language.</b> There is a lot of wry humor, which is quite fitting for a tale of two sisters who thrive on words and wordplay. In a nod to the girls’ obsession with odd words and the contents of their old dictionary, each chapter heading is—what else?—a dictionary entry for a word that relates to the chapter. Often, the words are highly obscure, archaic, or printed alongside a less-common definition for them. Always, they are fascinating, and my personal vocabulary has definitely grown by at least a few words.

<b><i>The Grammarians</i> also succeeds wildly in its portrayal of the complexities of sisterhood, individuality, and feminism.</b> Daphne and Laurel frequently butt heads over the importance of career, the importance of family, the importance of where you live and what you do and who you do it with. When one is dissatisfied with her appearance, the other takes offense, knowing that she looks exactly the same, and therefore she, too, is “ugly” to her sister. The two clash over issues of what you “should” do versus what you want to do, differences that ultimately escalate into shaping the girls’ opinions of language as a whole—one becomes a prescriptivist; the other, a descriptivist. Although they love each other fiercely, they are often at odds with one another, sometimes to such an extreme that their friends and family fear they will never reunite—and both girls’ thoughts and opinions on these fronts are exquisitely rendered, an all-too-real depiction of siblings trying to define themselves apart from each other.

There are a few quibbles I have, of course. For one, there are the frequent shifts in narration throughout the book—always in third person, but sometimes filtered through the mind of either Laurel or Daphne, sometimes through one of their husbands, sometimes through their cousin Brian, and sometimes through their mother. Getting this broader view of the sisters’ lives is nice, especially seeing it through the eyes of the men they marry, but sometimes it comes across as odd; Brian, in particular, is a great character, but his role in the twins’ lives is minimal, and usually he just gets a quick observation of them here or there. I was also disappointed at a fairly large moment that ended up being told from their mother’s perspective, which irked me, because the story isn’t really about her. There are also shifts in tense, from past to present to future and back again. Though a bit jarring, most of these make sense; my only complaint is that the end of the book takes place as one long prediction, written in future tense. I won’t say what that prediction includes, but it is fairly long and detailed, and it wasn’t as satisfying as I would have liked.

As a whole, <b>this is a quick, fun read for the logophile in your life.</b> Despite its occasional flaws in pacing and narrative choices, it paints a vivid portrait of two memorable women. It will make you laugh, and it will make you feel smarter (or perhaps dumber, when they start casually tossing out complaints about very specific grammatical issues that you don’t really think about, but now will never forget…).

Really enjoyed this book as a word nerd myself these young girls captured my interest.These young twins make up their own language are fascinated by the huge dictionary their father brings home and inspires their individual path to l language #netgalley#fsg

I had a problem getting into this, and it didn't work for me. It may be that I've gotten tired of family disruptions and am looking for other subject matter. For those into that, it may work out for them.

'There was something wayward in the twins’ relationship now, a devious shift Sally sensed but could not catch in the act.'

Much like their father Arthur and his brother Don ‘were like trees that had been planted too near each other”, redheaded, identical twins Laurel and Daphne Wolfe have a bond that begins with a secret shared language until even their love of words pushes them apart and the relationship feels like a confinement. As in all sibling relationships, there is always one sister/brother that rises above the other. One who rushes head first into things, the default leader. Laurel begins to long for autonomy, to resent the ‘we’ that follows Daphne’s thoughts, decisions. Daphne’s childhood has been one spent as the second born “Laurel was older by seventeen minutes. Daphne hated those seventeen minutes” sure “I’ll never catch up” and maybe shocked when she surpasses Laurel.

Laurel clings to the interior life she can keep for herself, thoughts she doesn’t have to share, weary of her life being lived in equal measure with her twin. Daphne, on the other hand resents when her sister keeps secrets, hates change. She despises the ways Laurel distances herself from their twin-ship. They’ll always have their shared love of words though, right? The balance shifts when Laurel marries, has a child and Daphne becomes a career woman. Suddenly, Laurel no longer feels like the ‘top dog’, her days spent with her child treated as less than the work Daphne does, though ‘she knows just as much about language’. When she returns to teaching, inspiration is born. Daphne’s successfully popular career as a columnist “preserving the dignity of and elegance of Standard English” is interrupted by Laurel’s revolt of the language rules through her poetry. It is like a smack in the face of everything Daphne has worked so hard to keep pure! Really, who is Laurel fooling, just as obsessed with the proper usage of language since birth? Just like Laurel’s mission to differentiate herself through her physical features, here she goes making yet another division in a world they once shared! Anything to always come out ahead, at Daphne’s expense!

The sisters relationship comes crashing down. Their mother, who has never been as close to her girls as they are to each other, now must witness the unraveling of their bond. Then there is the dictionary which remains “the subject of bitter controversy”, an inanimate object that is also, the subject of custody. It all returns to their daddy’s gift of the biggest book imaginable, ‘an ocean of a book’, placed upon a stand like an altar, Merriam Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition. It is where the sisters “two little faces pecking at the musty pages of a dead man’s discarded book” were always found, the very thing that united and divides them. Their wordy little world is precocious which can sometimes come off as annoying or exhausting in a novel, instead I was tickled. I just kept thinking ‘oh you little bluestockings you!’ Will their mother ever see the day when they come back together? There truly are far worse vices for children than an obsession with words and yet to think they could cause so much trouble!

It’s really not about the words, it’s about all the years between them, it’s about the closeness of their twin-hood that begins to feel like an incarceration of their independent selves. Perception is everything, it makes or breaks you. Even in the unsettling feeling their uncle Don feels being around them, and their mother’s jealousy of the distance she is kept at because of their congenital bond, it follows such roles become suffocating. It’s so silly, our escape routes from family. This isn’t an explosive fall out, so much of the destruction is a slow chipping away of their sisterhood, how they see themselves and each other, how roles define us, something completely different in twins. You can’t be any closer, can you? The ending is perfect, maybe their mother Sally doesn’t share their genius for words, but she sure as hell understands her children, it’s a bittersweet ending, and I like how Sally tells a story better.

There is just something about this novel that clicked with me, it’s a quiet smoldering sisterhood, all the things we say and do as much as what we hold back. That hunger for independence, to be something other than the younger, or the older sister. Just an entity unto oneself, so much harder when twined with another.

Publication Date: September 3, 2019

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Sarah Crichton Books

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the Kindle ARC of The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine. Being a , bibliophile myself, I was very anxious to read this book. I don't like to judge a book by its cover but I have to admit that the cover definitely drew me to this book - since it reminded me of my sister and me when we were young. The Grammarians is the story of twins, Laurel and Daphne, close as twins can be and, eventually, twice as competitive. As children, they develop their own twin language and are fascinated by grammar and books. As they grow, they become competitive with each other and end up not speaking to each other over perceived slights. At first, I wasn't sure The Grammarians was going to "grab" me enough to keep reading, but as the twins grew older, the book really picked up the pace and it became very enjoyable. The Grammarians is very much a story for book-lovers and sisters. Cathleen Schine's choice of words is sparkling and entertaining.

I was really drawn to this book and for good reason. Twins Daphne and Laurel are drawn to words and grammar at an early age and live their live immersed in the topic. I thought the character development was amazing in this novel and I loved the many quirks that occur in this book. I really loved the writing style of this author and did not want this book to end. Thanks for the ARC, Net Galley.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book, in exchange for my honest opinion. This will be available on September third.

Isn’t it funny how words can both simplify and add complexity, often simultaneously? This book was one of those rare stories where little happens, but in such an all-encompassing way that when you read the final sentence, you feel like you’ve experienced something profound.

Laurel and Daphne are identical twins. They’ve always been close, and they both share an unapologetic love for words. As they grow, this love stretches in different directions, causing first tension, then a full-blown rift.

I have a thing for books about books or language, so this one immediately interested me. I ended up really enjoying it. The way it was written was both clever and charming, but it never moved fully over into the fluff category. Daphne and Laurel were well-balanced and believable characters. Sometimes one or both of them would annoy me, but in an endearing way, if that makes sense.

The cast of characters in this book is on the small side, which only serves to bring out the impeccable quality of the writing. This is my first book by Cathleen Schine, and I can immediately see why she’s such a popular author. This was a smile in book form. I definitely recommend it.

As an editor (and a grammar nerd), I was excited to read this book based on the summary. However, it didn't live up to my expectations. One point that was way overdone was the fact that they were twins and they had red hair. The ending was quite abrupt. Overall, it just didn't click with me.

Cathleen Schine is an excellent writer, and you can tell this is a fact because she dares to write a book titled The Grammarians, which is partially about language and the use thereof. She knows her stuff, while I — working in the trenches — have to rely on Grammarly to check everything before I publish, and there’s still a chance that I might get things wrong. Anyhow, this is a book that is so good that you want to come up with new words to describe it: terrifidelic, supradelcious, and snazzerific all come to mind. However, The Grammarians is not just about the use of English, it is a magical story about sibling rivalry. Throughout the course of the tale, its main protagonists — sisters — grow farther and farther apart over the tricky business of tackling the slippery slope of modern English.

The story concerns two red-headed identical twins, Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, who, as babies, make up a nonsensical language that they can only communicate in. The early parts of the novel chart their upbringing: one day their father brings home a mammoth copy of Merriam Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition and the twins fawn over its pages, writing down words and definitions of things they don’t know. As adults, Daphne becomes the writer of a column in an alternative weekly newspaper in New York City about language, while Laurel becomes a school teacher, then a mother, and finally — and this might be a minor spoiler, as it happens late in the novel — a poet and a short story writer of some renown. But, as they age, the two sisters begin to grow apart from each other to a point where they basically stop speaking to one another.

If there’s a failing with the novel, it’s that we never really are sure what causes the rift. We learn that Daphne just gets busier and busier as her success blossoms, but there must be something more to it than that to put family obligations on the backburner. We never do find out if there was an argument that set the sisters off, they just gradually become unstuck from each other. This is a bit of a disappointment, because the sisters are inseparable in the novel’s first half — and, indeed, that’s the part of the story that is the most fun. (I almost wrote “funnest,” but I worried that I’d be called out for it.) After that, the book is still good — and it ends on a whopper of a tragedy that may bring a sentimental tear to your eye — but it lacks the sense of good-naturedness and wide-eyed wonder that preceded it.

However, because both sisters (at least, eventually) work in the language arts, there are long discussions about the use of grammar and syntax in English writing. You might have to be a bit of a book snob to enjoy these parts, but I am — even if I may be in a minority. (I’m the type of guy who can see a notice from the superintendent of my apartment building posted by the elevators and break out a red pen and find at least five to 10 things structurally and stylistically wrong with the notice.) In fact, these discussions are the only real sense we get that the sisters are argumentative with each other — so they’re there for a reason. (Even if fighting over the English language is a bit of a weak spot in terms of coming up with a motivation for two people to start hating each other.)

This is a novel that begs a larger question, though: what makes a family? Or maybe the question is, what is the bond between siblings and their extended family? (Though both might be one and of the same thing.) That’s what makes The Grammarians so fascinating. This is a bold family drama that is nearly peerless in displaying both sisterly love and hate. As noted, the book ends on a bit of a downbeat note, so there is sadness and a chance for reflection by novel’s end, but it never comes across as cloying or saccharine. Characters come and go from these people’s lives, while some still remain close. Envy plays a role in some of these relationships, as does pity. Even though Laurel and Daphne are more or less at each other’s throats by novel’s end, they still remain likable despite their flaws. That’s a hard feat for a writer to pull off.

So, in a nutshell, I immensely enjoy reading this pleasurable novel. It got me thinking about my own family (why can’t we all just get along?) and also may have taught me a thing or two about noun-verb agreement. (To be fair, though, I just had to look that up to recall what exactly that thing was called.) If you’re bookish or just love language — and I can think of one other person in my life who would love this book — The Grammarians will largely sit right with you. While this is a fairly quick book to read, I felt a twinge of sadness at closing the cover on this one, which may have to be remedied by reading it again at some point in the not-so distant future. If that admission doesn’t get you off the couch and to the bookstore to buy this thing, you’ll be missing out on a fantasterastic, spiffilicous, and satisfactical novel that begs to be read by as many book and language nerds out there as humanly possible. In short, The Grammarians is a real treat and treasure of a find. Bonus points, too, for being written by an LGBTQ author, which I haven’t even mentioned. (Along with the fact that every chapter opens up with a dictionary definition of a usually rare word.) I heart this book and just about everything about it. I hope you will, too.

The Grammarians is a quirky book about red-headed twins called Laurel and Daphne. They are precocious and not very likeable, and become pedantically obsessed with the correct use of language. This is a timely book in the post-truth era of Donald Trump.
Daphne in particular becomes obsessed with correcting people's use of language, which is both funny and really unkind. The twins never learn that there are more important things than being right, and miss out on the happiness their husbands find together as friends. Three stars.

I always enjoy books about twins but found this one to be a bit slow going. It was well-written but there was little plot. I couldn’t figure out why I was supposed to care about either of them. It was very flat.

This was not my favorite Cathleen Schine books. While the characters were certainly quirky, I didn't find them as likeable as Schine's other offbeat characters in her previous work.

THE GRAMMARIANS is a thoroughly delightful novel about siblings, family and the importance of language. It follows twins Daphne and Laurel, who created their own twin language as toddlers and led them on a lifelong fascination with words. Schine follows the twin through their lives, marriages and careers in a whimsical fashion. Schine gives us characters we adore (especially Uncle Don) and reawakens our love of words, words, words. And, since I was raised (sorry, reared) by the grammar police, the squabbles about proper usage made me laugh out loud! Now i know what Mom is getting for Christmas.

The Grammarians are identical twins, bright red hair extraordinary minds and a bizarre fascination with words and their usage. Laurel and Daphne grow up with a unique sense of oneness, which includes their fixation with language.

They grow up together, start their careers, marry together and finally part, over those very words and the giant dictionary that became a centerpiece of this fixation.

While I always enjoy Schines’s novels, I found myself very interested in the relationships of the twins and their family, but not especially involved with the minutiae of grammar that surrounded their relationship.

I truly couldn’t understand this mania for words and language.

Thank you Netgalley for allowing me to review a new novel by Cathleen Schine.

Laurel and Daphne Wolfe are identical twins with a love of language. From a very young age they communicated with each other in a language they created. Even after they began speaking English they would still fall back on their private language. Laurel was born first, which set the stage for a little bit of sibling rivalry, and as they grow older the rivalry also grows.

I loved the way the author started each chapter with an entry from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, the way Daphne collected words while Laurel provided the definitions of the words, and the way they played with words. The twins were very intelligent and used words with joy but they also used words to cause distress; their psychiatrist uncle seemed to be afraid of the twins. It was interesting to watch as they finally grew into individuals, as painful as it was.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this new book in exchange for an honest review. I had read almost a third before I finally gave up. The fact of the identical twins was expounded upon over and over and over along with the fact of their red hair. Because of the manner in which it was presented, you’d think no one else in the history of the world had ever had red hair.

The twins were fascinated with words and their etymology from an early age – this, too, was told to the reader multiple times. Their father brought home a Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary for them to use. This dictionary apparently was the basis for some sort of rift between them in their adult lives, but I never got that far in the story. However, I thought it odd since so much of the plot had to do with this particular dictionary that each chapter was introduced by a definition from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language. I guess that was explained later, but it was one of many elements that simply didn’t flow with the telling of this story of red headed twins.

Having grown up with 5 sets of identical twins (none of them red headed!) and having taught 2 sets, I was looking forward to a story featuring twins. Sadly this novel failed to hold my interest.