Review: Head Trip

Summary:
When two brothers are conceived a month apart--called superfetation--then are born eight months later, one of them is a full-term baby and one of them is a preemie. That anomalie affected their whole lives as one twin struggled to succeed and the other struggled to keep up. For various reasons they were envious of each other, and their journey became a real head trip, both literally and figuratively. It continually challenged them to understand their twin and the dynamic that shaped their lives.

My Review: 

Head Trip by Jack Eadon, tells the story of two brothers born from the same womb at the same time, but conceived a month apart.  An occurrence named Superfetation, which,  apparently this very rarely ever happens in humans, but is common in animals. Now this story is part of a series that looks closely at the seven deadly sins. This book’s theme is envy.  

Right away we see evidence of one brother’s envy over the other, quite literally from conception to death.  The embryos even have a mini battle in the womb right after conception.  Now I’m not going to focus my review on the religious aspect of this book. It’s relating the concept of Envy, therefore there are many allusions to religious ideas.  This isn’t my usual cup of tea, but I felt it was quite an interesting plot. 

Both babies grow at a different pace, which makes sense since they are a month apart. The bigger, older fetus would pick fights with the tinier one in the womb, thus setting up the story for the rest of their lives.  The bigger more developed baby growing a deep sense of anger or hatred over the smaller one, or the “intruder” as he is referred to in the beginning. 

As they get older, Roger and Marcus spend a good deal of theirs lives in “battle” with each other.  This is shown by one brother, Roger, constantly trying to exert his dominance over his brother.  He goes about this in very alarming and horrible ways.  He teases and taunts the younger brother, and makes him feel inadequate. The other, smaller brother has many difficulties throughout his life because of his smaller size and premature birth.  He goes through many trials and many issues throughout his life.  

Envy steps in because of these difficulties.  Marcus gets a lot of attention because he is smaller and needs more care, thus creating even more animosity from Roger.  Roger hates the attention and grows more and more hostile with his brother.   I thought that this was a great observation on how hate and envy can exist in a person and pretty much ruin their lives.  Eadon hits a home run with this concept.

Now to what I felt was a bit of a distraction. There were several parts of this book that were a little uncomfortable to read, mostly related to Marcus and his nether regions.  Now I get the reasons this is brought up. He’s underdeveloped and the writer wants to give examples. I just felt it could have been done a bit better. There are several very awkward sex scenes that were kind of hard to read. Not that they were really all that graphic, just kind of distracting from the story. 

All in all I would say this was a book with a good concept, a few flaws, but decent writing.