How the Blessed Live considers a modern family while mirroring mythic relationships that muddle magic and the real world. Susannah Smith opens this first novel with quotes from the myth of Isis and Osiris, and uses this legend as a template for her own story about the impact of the intense bond between a twin sister and brother.

The novel begins promisingly, introducing a character in the midst of remaking herself from backwater nymph to city waif. Lucy is attempting to escape the reality of her unwanted child, fathered by her twin brother, but this secret is not as compelling as the character of Lucy herself and the kaleidoscopic image Smith paints of Vancouver. Lucy takes a job as the personal assistant for the ringmaster of The Holy Circus, a nightly show of humans with freakish otherworldly talents – the old lady who sleeps in water and thus preserves her youth, Stigmata Man, and a woman who calls forth every variety of bird while she swings on her human perch.

These fantastic creations, and Lucy herself, are beautiful, whimsical, and believable in spite of their impossibility – the lack of explanation for their existence actually heightens the illusion.

But when Smith attempts to explore why Lucy engaged in the ill-fated coupling with her brother, Levi, the story goes flat. Daniel, the twins’ father, recounts the background of the twins’ lives in letters to his dead wife, explaining how Levi and his sister were raised on an island in Lake Ontario, with myths and legends for inspiration and only each other for companionship. The letters have a pedantic tone, and Lucy and Levi’s upbringing is not compelling enough to explain their single sexual encounter. Levi’s side of the story, told while he is at art school in Montreal, also lacks the lyrical quality of his sister’s experience, and that city never gets the magic treatment that Smith provides for Vancouver.

The Isis and Osiris myth might have ultimately served Smith better as inspiration for a single character, instead of a framework for an entire story. By attempting to fully explore this mythic relationship in a modern context, Smith undermines the part of her tale that has a vibrant life of its own.