Opposites
This book is told through verse, thus it is not as dependent upon complete sentences as a prose novel. “Cold. / Controlled. / That makes me the sperm, / I guess. I take completely after our father.” With this terse imagery, the first-person narrator distinguishes herself from her identical twin beginning in the process of fetal development. The narrator, Raeanne, situates her sister, Kaeleigh as the symbolic representative of their mother, the egg. She views herself as the metaphorical representative of their father, the sperm that penetrated that egg. This mirror image of the two sisters will permeate throughout the narrative.
Darkness
Arguably, perhaps darkness is the defining metaphor of the modern age. It has become a task to pick up two novels randomly and not find the metaphor of darkness in at least one. “I'm related to all of them, heiress of darkness.” The use of it in this case is the most popular one: an all-encompassing term for evil. The narrator is using darkness as a metaphor for the evil acts perpetrated by her father. She even personifies the darkness as a “demon” which pushed him into that darkness. This assertion is a confession that she is one of the candidates for that demon being inside her dad.
Irony
One problematic thing with using historical references as metaphorical imagery is that the historical record has a way of changing. “He stands, hands on his hips, looking a lot like Wyatt Earp, facing down bad guys at the OK Corral.” The narrator is describing her dad here using a metaphorical reference to a figure from the Wild West days of American history. The irony is that Earp literally wrote his own history book and for most of the 20th century actually was viewed as the good guy at the OK Corral gunfight. Recent revelations have strongly suggested that Earp was really just as much a villain as the narrator’s father.
Abuse
The darkness and devil of the demonic father are expressed through the sexual abuse of his own daughter. This is the sort of horror and terror that almost demands to be conveyed through metaphorical language because it is almost too much to spell it out literally. “I don't cry out, but I do cry a bucket of silent tears.” This is the narrator’s reaction to another physical assault in the middle of the night. The imagery of a bucket filled with tears cried silently is a more powerful testament to the complications of this act than the same bucket filled with shouts and salty water.
Daddy
The worst aspect of the abuse in this story is that it is a father abusing a young daughter. That means episodes in which the two personae of the man combine to create disturbing metaphorical imagery. The narrator describes how her father caresses “A pink angora sweater, pets it softly as if it were the bunny the fur was stripped from.” The physical act of petting something as if it were the soft fur of a rabbit takes on a completely different level of creepiness within this simile that makes the disgust almost palpable for the reader. Underlying that visual image is the word choice of the language itself in which the word “stripped” almost subliminally suggests a darker meaning to the scene.
