The novel uses first-person narration to forge a strong and immediate bond between the reader and the protagonist. The first-person point of view also contributes to suspense as the plot unfolds, since the reader only finds out information as Julie does. Particularly in the lead-up to Julie discovering her twin’s body, this suspense propels readers through the rising action of the plot as Julie tries to understand what has happened to Chloe.

This limited point of view means that readers only have access to Julie’s perspective and interpretation of events, and as the plot unfolds, she will emerge as an unreliable narrator who has a significant investment in winning the reader over to her side. At times, Julie appears to address the reader directly, such as when she states, “one thing needs to be made clear: I did not kill my twin sister” (1). These instances of direct address are eventually explained by the reveal that the entire narrative is Julie’s account of events, conveyed to her social media audience. The same intimacy that fuels parasocial relationships between influencers and followers also serves to create a slightly dubious and claustrophobic intimacy between readers and a narrator who may or may not be entirely trustworthy.

Julie’s backstory has elements of fantasy and myth, particularly the Cinderella story: After being orphaned, she is adopted by an evil stepmother figure (in this case, her aunt), who mistreats her, and her caring and economically stable birth family is exchanged for loneliness, emotional abuse, and poverty. This context primes Julie to see herself as deserving of a change of fortune and elevation of social status: she wants to go back to what she might have had, if only her parents had not died. The contrast between Julie and Chloe’s fates heightens the sense that Julie has been robbed of something. As identical twins born into the same family, Julie and Chloe might reasonably have expected to have similar life outcomes, but their differing outcomes starkly reveal The Pernicious Effects of Unearned Privilege. With her adoption into a wealthy, white family, Chloe gains access to significant economic and cultural privilege, and her glamorous adult life demonstrates the effects of this privilege.  

Because of these disparities and the callous way in which Chloe treats Julie, the relationship between the sisters is ambivalent, and Julie’s longing to be close to her sister often manifests as anger and resentment. Other contemporary novels, such as Coco Mellors’s Blue Sisters and Ann Napolitano’s Hello, Beautiful, have likewise explored fraught relationships between sisters. Julie both loves and despises Chloe in equal measure, and her sense of betrayal and anger is heightened because she would have been so happy to learn that her sister truly cared for her. Julie’s ambivalent feelings about her sister strongly reflect the theme of The Need for Love and Belonging.

Because Julie and Chloe are identical twins, Julie sometimes struggles to distinguish her own identity from that of her famous sister, an effect heightened by the fact that she knows Chloe mostly through her carefully cultivated identity on social media. Seeing her twin sister only on social media, Julie sees a version of herself as she could have been with more privilege and access. This confusion primes her to rationalize doing something as shocking as assuming her sister’s identity. The narrative potential of twins who can be mistaken for one another has a long history in literature. William Shakespeare explored these possibilities in plays such as Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors, while contemporary novels such as Brit Bennet’s The Vanishing Half explore themes of competition and loss between identical twin sisters.

Julie’s fateful decision to assume her sister’s identity positions her in the tradition of ambitious protagonists who make a short-sighted and ultimately tragic choice; for example, the protagonists of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus both make decisions (to kill the king and to bargain away their soul, respectively) under the influence of rapacious ambition, and each must later grapple with the tragic consequences. As a young woman, Julie is not the typical figure associated with reckless ambition, but Zhang explores how platforms such as social media both create new opportunities to gain power and corrupt the individuals who become obsessed with seeking out that power. Julie explicitly rationalizes a morally dubious act, arguing that “I deserve it, don’t I? Chloe had everything while I suffered with nothing” (39). Julie’s decision to assume her sister’s identity represents both her fatal error and one of the first examples of a pattern where she refuses to take responsibility for her actions, relying instead on defensiveness and self-justification.