"The Grammarians" by Cathleen Schine

The Grammarians, so we're told, is a book about twins who love--and fight over--words, a passion which (according to the blurb) comes to climax in a fight over a beloved Webster's Dictionary. With such a summary and a title like The Grammarians, it's easy to believe the book is comprised of witty repartee about vocabulary, obscure arguments about punctuation use. Such reductiveness--girls whose passion for language is all-consuming!--can come off twee, even among readers who also like to discuss favorite words (I learned "eephus" the other day and adore its oomph) and praise the versatile colon (which may or may not have been my Halloween costume this year). Not wanting to see my passion made into mockery (see: science and The Big Bang Theory), I'd avoided the book despite seeing it praised. 

But, as the saying goes, don't trust a book by its cover--or by its title and its blurb, which were probably written by someone who thinks a colon can only introduce a list.

(By the way, what is up with the FOUR parentheticals in the opening paragraph? I'm aware they're excessive, and yet I'm loath to remove them, dear [non-existent] reader, as I'm feeling rather 19th-century amiable today. Don't worry, I'll give up the affectation.) 

The Grammarians is about Laurel and Daphne, two identical twins who do love language--both the secret language by which they communicate and the words inscribed in their beloved Webster's Dictionary. And their lives do intersect and conflict over the written word. Daphne eventually becomes a newspaper copyeditor with a popular--and pedantic--column grousing over the demise of the English language. Laurel ends up a "found verse" poet, rearranging old, colloquial, and grammatically-incorrect correspondence to form modern poems. Lauren and Daphne fight over many things, including whether "good" language is an unchanging truth or a social construction of the privileged, but the mention of the fight over the dictionary in the blub is both a spoiler and a misdirect, as it occurs in the last twenty or so pages of the novel.

Ultimately, the heart of the sisters' conflict is not language but their relationship to each other, the push and pull as each seeks to be similar to each other and also independent. When, for example, Laurel gets engaged, Daphne rushes to find a spouse too, in order to have a double wedding. They're thrilled to experience the life moment together. But when Laurel chooses to be a stay-at-home mother rather than pursue a career, Daphne is incensed. For Daphne, especially, Laurel's choice to make decisions different than Daphne (especially when Laurel gets a nose job, thereby condemning both their noses) reads as condemnation of Daphne herself. It's a messy relationship that anyone with a sister or best friend can identify with.

Thus, though language provides a connecting thread in the novel, it's not really the focus of the novel. Much of both women's lives are separate from debates over the written word. Schine follows the sisters from birth through late age, but she isn't interested in a methodical retelling of their lives. Instead, the novel jumps around, covering some events in great detail before jumping forward with little concern about the time skipped. Some characters, such as their cousin Brian, get a lot of page time but don't seem particularly connected to the greater whole. The effect is a (paradoxically) full but partial snapshot of two smart, independent, and stubborn sisters.