Review
To read a Tana French novel is an experience that involves
understanding the heart and soul of each of her fabulously
flawed characters. Her characters are endowed with major
personal issues, seeming to live on the outskirts of
society's mandates due to life crises that have changed and
damaged them irrevocably. Cassie Maddox, the main character
in
The Likeness, is complex and disturbed. She
travels from one turbulent life event to another without any
time to mend her wounded being. She is a loner, has issues
from her childhood and seems to be drawn to other similarly
flawed people.
Her parents were killed when she was a small child so she
was raised by kindly but emotionally detached relatives who
provided everything she needed but familial love. She became
involved...
Beyond the Book
Doppelgangers
When Cassie sees a woman lying stabbed to death who looks
exactly like her, with an ID that matches the identity she
used for years as an undercover detective, it seems clear
that she is looking at her own doppelganger.
- The dictionary describes a doppelganger (or
doubleganger, from the German for 'doublegoer' or
lookalike) as a ghostly double or counterpart of a
living person. In the vernacular the term has come to be
used more loosely to describe any sort of double.
- The doppelgangers of folklore are said to have no
shadows or reflection (similar in some ways to
vampires). They are inevitably bad news, being either...
