The Woman Who Met Herself - Laura Pearson - ★★★.¼

AUTHOR: Laura Pearson

GENRE: Contemporary Fiction

PUBLICATION DATE: May 23, 2025

RATING: 3.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: A contemporary fiction about two women and their doppelgänger twist. Some good characters and thought-provoking sentiments. Some exaggerations and melodrama. So a typical uplit in many ways. Liked the first half, but the second half felt a bit shaky. Recommended to fans of the genre.

Plot Preview:

Ruth Waverly, 62, lives with her husband Nigel in a good house and runs a baking business from home. Her grown-up twin sons are away from home and are successful in their independent lives.

Debbie Jones, also 62, is a widow with no kids and has newly moved into town. Craving for interaction, she takes a job soliciting door-to-door donations for a charity.

One day, Debbie knocks on Ruth's door. To their shock, they are doppelgängers of each other. That's when their life changes forever.

The story comes to us in the alternating third-person perspectives of Ruth and Debbie, with some interludes from an unknown character’s first-person POV.

Many uplit stories with doppelgängers end with the characters swapping places with each other. Thankfully, this doesn’t go down that path. But the path it chooses to take is a bit unsteady.

Bookish Yays:

👭🏻 Debbie’s character. Loved her presence of mind, her boldness of spirit, and her largeness of heart.

👭🏻 The contrast between the personalities of Ruth and Debbie. Leads to some interesting moments. I like how the prologue itself challenges our initial perception about the lead characters’ state of happiness because of their personal situation. A good lesson on not to jump to conclusions based on minimal info.

👭🏻 The fact that both Debbie and Ruth are senior characters at 62, and the writing shows them as typical real women of that age, not as youthful matriarchs nor as geriatric curmudgeons.

👭🏻 The focus on women’s dilemmas, and how they are taken for granted at home is especially well done. The guilts of motherhood (especially in the initial days) are also explored convincingly.

👭🏻 The depiction of one secondary character’s dementia. As my father is in the initial stages of the same, this was very scary and true-to-life for me.

👭🏻 The title, which works on two levels if you think about it. It’s an indication not just of a woman who met her carbon copy but also of a woman who finally understood who she actually was rather than sticking to what the world thought she ought to be. Both these interpretations are applicable to Ruth as well as Debbie.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🎭 While the premise is great, there is not much mystery about the situation. It is quite easy to take a stab at the backstory of the resemblance, given the abundant clues. Of course, this isn't marketed as a mystery, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

🎭 There are plenty of subplots, not all of which are connected to the main story. Some of these are interesting, some are plain annoying.

🎭 The first-person interludes that come in between some chapters are quite interesting, but these also offer spoilers to us readers. We thus end up learning some key facts before Debbie or Ruth do.

🎭 The character-focused narrative and somewhat introspective tone are quite unusual for this genre. Many scenes invite reflection in a practical way. This, along with the resultant slower pace, might not work for some readers.

Bookish Nays:

🤼 No depth to most of the secondary characters. The men in Ruth's family are – no other way of putting this – idiots. The most irritating character to me, however, was Ruth’s younger sister, Kate. I couldn’t buy how she wanted Ruth and Debbie to go to the media with their strange story in order to use the resources she had access to as a journalist and dig into what might have happened. Could she not have used her network of connections to help her sister without killing their privacy?

🤼 The predictability. The plot sticks to a fairly guessable path, even though the characters are often caught unawares by the reveals. This could be forgiven because of the genre itself being straightforward. But what’s obviously formulaic is that most family characters are jerks and all non-family characters are heartwarming.

🤼 The first half is still fairly okay as the plot development is fairly controlled. The second half goes a bit haywire, with too much needless melodrama, unnecessary subplots and redundant twists.

All in all, not a bad read, but also not a memorable read. This is my fifth book by this author, and while I have liked all her works, this ends up the least favourite mainly because of the second half. I think I like her books better when they include a dash of magical realism, which was missing from this plot.

Recommended, but not as a must-read. It would work well when you are in the mood for an emotional and introspective found-family story.

My thanks to Boldwood Books for providing the DRC of “The Woman Who Met Herself” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.