Some novels captivate us with a gripping premise and rocket-powered plot. Others charm us more quietly – though no less pleasurably – with a small, domestic, character-driven story that relies not on external pyrotechnics but on intimate emotional conflicts. Of the two, the second is probably the harder for a writer to carry off successfully, but Bernice Thurman Hunter has done it in her latest novel, Two Much Alike, which follows a year in the life of twin girls, Connie and Carrie Taylor, approaching adolescence in 1950s Detroit.

In the opening dinner scene, Hunter deftly establishes a believably suburban world, and uses small details to conjure up not just the period, but the socio-economic status of her characters: pork chops, savoy cabbage, and mashed potatoes; the chicken-shaped toothpick holder in the middle of the table; the salt and pepper all in one shaker. With its leisurely, episodic structure, the book’s rhythm mirrors that of a real child’s life: brief spurts of crisis and excitement punctuated by the pleasures of quotidian ritual. Connie and Carrie do what all girls do: fight over their clothes and hairstyles and which friends to walk to school with; they watch too much TV and fudge their homework. But their relationship with one another is the emotional backbone of the story, and the source of its main conflict: Carrie is getting tired of being a twin, of feeling like half a person. She wants, in her own words, “to individuate.”

Interestingly, the protagonist is not Carrie but Connie, who narrates the story in first person. It is unusual in children’s literature for the hero to be the less-dynamic character, the conformist. Initially Connie thinks it’s great that when she and her sister write compositions on their summer holidays, they’re virtually identical. She likes the twin language they invented, and the way they each can guess what the other’s thinking. But when Carrie comes down with scarlet fever, her hair falls out and grows back in curly, making her for the first time recognizably different from her sister. Gleefully seizing this opportunity for individuality, Carrie starts up a friendship with Ruby Butternick, which Connie boycotts. This conflict between the girls simmers throughout the novel, alternating with periods of reconciliation. There are no full-volume crises to mar the careful realism that Hunter creates and sustains so well.

Things do get more complicated when Connie starts developing her own friendship with Wendy Johnson, a poor girl who lives alone with her depressive mother. This is a chance for Connie to experience a totally different lifestyle, and Hunter brings out the small details that kids notice about the homes of their school friends, with all their intriguing and disturbing differences. At the Johnson house, Wendy does the cooking, making Kraft Dinner. Connie helps: “As I stirred, the powder melted and began to smell like cheese. My stomach rumbled with excitement. Then Wendy did the strangest thing. Instead of an oilcloth or placemats, she spread sheets of newspaper on the kitchen table. On top of them she set out three plates, three spoons, three cups with no saucers, and a pint of milk. Carrying a stemmed glass in one hand, and a cigarette and ashtray in the other, Mrs. Johnson sat down jerkily at the end of the table…”

Ironically, Connie’s friendship with Wendy becomes stronger than any of her sister’s friendships. After Wendy’s mother commits suicide, Wendy lives with the sisters for a short time before moving to another town to be with relatives. And so the Taylor girls carry on with their forays into extra-sisterly friendships and activities, without ever straying very far from one another’s company. Hunter saves the only real external crisis to the very end, when Carrie is injured badly in a car accident, and only Connie’s rare, matching blood type can save her life.

Hunter’s writing is brisk and effortless, and she manages to pack a lot into her short, punchy chapters. Initially I couldn’t help wishing that Connie’s narration had a bit more verve, and that there was more to set the twins apart, other than Carrie’s repeated proclamations to be an individual. But the characters quickly grow on you.

Part of what makes Hunter’s story so pleasurable is that it is decidedly gentle. The twins mature without taking any major risks, and their closeness never really seems to have any ill effects. Connie’s ability to literally feel the pain of her injured sister seems more a demonstration of empathy than unhealthy symbiosis. Hunter’s minor characters are deftly handled, including the twins’ parents: the kindly authoritarian father and the sardonic mother. Hunter also suffuses the book with an understated sense of humour, which periodically spikes into moments of Brian Doyle-like exuberance. Petrified after learning about body odour in their “female hygiene” class, the twins obsess about washing, and their mother offers some practical advice: “There’s a bottle of vinegar-and-water on the windowsill. Give yourselves a good sluice under your arms then lather up with the Lifebuoy.”

Though Two Much Alike is most obviously about asserting one’s individuality, and testing the line between love and dependence, Hunter’s novel is also about the larger issue of change itself. Poised as she is on the brink of adolescence, Connie’s reluctance to lose her twin starts seeming less a desire for conformity than a very understandable and universal fear of change. When Connie says, “The thing I liked best about Christmas was that it was the same every year,” it will surely hit a chord with every reader, child or adult, about the desire for unchanging security and happiness.