Identical by Ellen Hopkins

In the book Identical by Ellen Hopkins we hear and see the story throughout Kaeleigh's eyes as well as Anneleigh. However, we need to hear the story from other important people so that we can fill in the missing gaps of the story much quicker, and see problems in the book with more proficiency. ex: at the end of the book we find out that Kaeleigh is so emotionally affected by the accident that her father had, that she has forced herself to believe that her dead sister was still alive, also contributing to this problem was her sexual abuse from her father. We need to have the voices or perspective of Kaeleigh's father and her mother.

Ellen Hopkins only lets us hear the voice of Kaeleigh although we also need to hear her father because he contributes to Kaeleigh's trauma with her double personality without her realizing it. We need to know the father's perspective because he is such a closed person on the outside where he doesn't let anyone know his problems so we never read the reason why he abuses his own daughter, what trauma happened in his early life that motivated him to do these actions. If we were to see the fathers inside we could see what haunts him, why he is so closed to the outside world, why he hides himself until he gets drunk and he lets his inner demon out. Later in the book Annaleigh (Kaeleigh) visits there grandfather that reveals the reason why his father is a monster. We find out through the grandfather that his father was filmed naked with another girl, creating child pornography and putting it all over the Internet. His father has had so much rage because he felt like he had no control, and so he has become the opposite of what he saw at home: strictness, good fame, money etc.

Kaeleigh's mother is missing and we need her because she is affected by the accident of losing her child. She is devastated like any mother would be, but she forgets that she has another child that is still alive and completely ignores Kaleigh. Kaleigh feels like her mother didn't save a little bit of love for her, and in part this is true, because, after her mother runs for congress woman staying away from her house for long periods of time, and she only stopped by because she needed to take pictures with her family, so that the media would have a "good" image of her. We need her voice because without it we cannot know for sure what's going on, if she really doesn't love her remaining daughter, if the reason she is away from home is because she doesn't want to spend time with Kaeleigh. We need to know what she feels and what she thinks in order to really understand the true story not just what Kaeleigh thinks is happening in other people's mind.

If we were to have all these opinions we would have a complete story, where we could hear a little bit of everyone's opinion on their surroundings, there family, and their life in general, because without it we wouldn't have the facts but inferences.