Review by Frank Plowright

At some point in the near future a woman wanting a baby without having a partner applies for an experimental IVF procedure. It’s successful, and twins develop, at which point the woman is informed that one of her twins is fully human, but the other is a scientific breakthrough grown from an artificially produced egg.

Leah Hayes employs massively decompressed storytelling, using spreads and minimal content per page, which results in the information conveyed in the above paragraph occupying Identical’s first third. The art is also very much an acquired taste, mannered simplicity in Prussian blue, lacking the finesse of the cover and disclosing little more than the text. Only vary rarely does it feature anything other than faces, leaving much of the story told in brief blocks of text.

As Hayes supplies a matter of fact first person narration, readers are led to wonder whether it’s the narrator or her sister who developed from the artificial egg. Differences are pointed out, but they amount to little more than the differences between other siblings, and it’s underlined that there’s a closeness despite contrasting attitudes.

Midway through Hayes introduces a more sinister proposition. At this point there’s still a slim possibility of Identical developing into something of interest, as it’s the sort of prospect Richard Sala could work so well. Instead Hayes opts for speculation rather than anything bolstered by narrative proof, and as such undermines any chance of most readers not severing any investment they might have had in how things progress.

Identical is an extremely slim, emotionally detached story, almost an exercise in artificially extending minimal content to maximum page count, so justifying a nicely designed book with a $25 cover price.