This New Novel Is Basically A Grown-Up Parent Trap

Imagine that well into your adult life, you discovered you had a half-sibling — someone your dad went to great lengths to hide from you. That’s the premise of the new book Maine Characters by Hannah Orenstein, an editor at Bustle. Hailed as “a grown-up Parent Trap,” it’s the story of two half-sisters, Vivian and Lucy, who meet for the first time at their father’s lake house after his unexpected death.

Below, in an exclusive excerpt, Vivian reflects on her complicated family as she and her half-sister watch the classic Lindsay Lohan movie.

If today was a preview of how the rest of Vivian’s summer with Lucy will go, she doesn’t hate it. Sure, it’s rocky. They aren’t exactly braiding each other’s hair. Lucy is sensitive and self-righteous, but Vivian is also fascinated by her. Nobody else will ever precisely understand the impact and insanity of their dad’s choices.

Lucy holds the missing pieces to the puzzle Vivian has fixated on for so long. It’s clear that Lucy inherited his love of the outdoors, his sentimental side, his innate connection to this place — which prompts the question, what did he pass down to Vivian? She doesn’t like the answer. She’s guarded, evasive, good at cleaving her personal life into two neat compartments. Spending time with Lucy isn’t comfortable, but it might be the most meaningful interaction she’s had with — family? — in a long time.

That night, they cast around for a movie they can agree on. Lucy flicks through their digital options, while Vivian blows dust off a box of VHS tapes.

“What do you think of this one?” she asks, holding up the Lindsay Lohan version of The Parent Trap.

“Will that be too weird?” Lucy asks.

“Probably. But it’s also perfect.”

As a kid, Vivian didn’t mind being an only child. Her roster of playdates and, later, piles of homework and after-school activities kept her too busy to be lonely. Her parents had tried to get pregnant again, but Celeste had had a string of miscarriages.

She understood that if you got lucky, a sibling could feel like another limb.

But after Vivian suspected she potentially had a sister somewhere out there, she became enthralled by her friends’ relationships with theirs. She watched them crowding in front of the bathroom mirror to dab on concealer from the same tube, bringing each other the right emergency snacks on bad cramp days, and cramming into a single twin bed during long weekend visits to each other’s colleges. She was intrigued by it all, jealous she’d been robbed of this. Not every family was that close, she knew that, but she understood that if you got lucky, a sibling could feel like another limb.

Even if she and Lucy can make peace with the wild disparities of their upbringings and forge a relationship — which still seems doubtful — they won’t ever achieve that instinctual ease. That kind of bond is soldered at birth, and they’d never been given the chance. The Parent Trap twins might know a thing or two about that.

She hits play. As the on-screen twins clash, she thinks, I get it, empathizing hard with both. She’s drawn to Hallie Parker, who grew up on a vineyard in Napa, for obvious reasons. Lucy would probably cast Vivian as Annie James, the rich city girl with the glamorous mother, and, well, she wouldn’t be wrong. Her empathy runs dry, however, when the girls are stuck living together and piece together that they’re twins. They fling themselves into a hug as the music swells. If only it were that simple.

In another scene, Annie complains to her mother about living apart from Hallie, pouting, “No offense, Mom, but this arrangement really sucks.”

“It could be so much worse,” Vivian says. Lucy shoots her a small, nervous smile.

Excerpted and adapted from Maine Characters (out on May 13, 2025), published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2025 by Hannah Orenstein.