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What stories could emerge from such a place?
In Twin Spirits, a young girl is tricked into touching a dead body and later meets a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to the deceased. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
As a child growing up in the heart of Cabrini-Green on Chicago’s North Side, I often felt imprisoned by my surroundings. Economic hardship shaped our lives. Although we lived only two miles from downtown Chicago, it felt like another world. Yet the one place where I always felt free was in my imagination. As the youngest in a large family, my stories and imagination became my safe haven—a place where no circumstance could limit where I could go or who I could become.
One place that especially fascinated me was the neighborhood funeral home. Almost everyone has, at some point, walked through the doors of a funeral home. It is a place filled with grief, memories, unanswered questions, and unexpected encounters. I began to wonder, What stories could emerge from such a place?
That simple question became the spark that gave birth to Twin Spirits.
Leona and Lillian’s history carries deep trauma, but also humor, music, and resilience. How did you approach balancing the darker elements of their past with their vitality and spirit?
For me, it was important that my characters were never defined by the painful things that happened to them. Trauma can shape a person, but it doesn’t have to become their entire identity. I wanted my characters to laugh, dream, make mistakes, love, and find moments of joy despite the hardships they endured.
Growing up in Cabrini-Green, I witnessed people who faced extraordinary challenges, yet they still found reasons to smile, celebrate, and care for one another. That resilience influenced how I wrote Twin Spirits. The darker elements of the story provide the emotional weight, but the vitality and spirit of the characters remind us that hope and healing are always possible.
I believe the human spirit is remarkably resilient. Even in our darkest moments, there is the capacity for compassion, forgiveness, and transformation. That balance between pain and hope is at the heart of Twin Spirits.
The story moves from what could feel like a ghost story into something more grounded and human. How did you decide where to draw that line between the supernatural and emotional reality?
I have always loved mysteries, and one of the things I appreciate most about them is that not every mystery has to be solved. Some questions are meant to linger, inviting readers to wrestle with their own interpretations long after the final page.
I chose to begin Twin Spirits as a ghost story because it provided a gentle way to ease readers into the far more complicated lives of the twins. But this novel is about much more than one set of twins. It is also about “twin spirits”—people who experience similar circumstances yet make entirely different choices. Their lives echo one another, but their paths ultimately diverge.
As a writer, there comes a point when you no longer worry about whether you’ve clearly drawn every line between mystery and reality. Instead, you trust the story to breathe. You allow the characters, the unanswered questions, and the emotional truths to exist together, giving readers the freedom to discover their own meaning within the mystery.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
My next fictional work is the second book in the Adventures with the Shortiez series, titled The House. As a writer, I am always working on something new, whether it is fiction or nonfiction. It is my home that the “The house”, will be available in December.
Author Links: Facebook | Website
Margarita’s sisters force her into a funeral home and make her touch a dead body—Lillian Smith’s. From that moment on, Margarita starts seeing Lillian everywhere, only to discover that the woman she keeps seeing isn’t Lillian’s spirit—it’s Leona, Lillian’s living twin.
Leona is everything Margarita is not—wealthy, magnetic, and impossible to ignore. She draws Margarita into a world of beauty, confidence, and possibility she never imagined. Over the years, their bond deepens, and Leona’s stories of a life marked by violence, early abandonment, and fractured relationships reveal that everything Leona is has come at a cost.
And the past Leona took such care to conceal will not stay buried. Truths begin to surface, and Margarita is forced to question who Leona really is and why their lives seem so uniquely tied together. What she discovers won’t just change who Leona is to her. It will rewrite her entire life.
Twin Spirits
Creola Thomas’s Twin Spirits is a layered, emotionally rich novel about memory, identity, family secrets, and the strange ways people find one another when they most need to be seen. The story begins with thirteen-year-old Margarita Carter, a thoughtful Chicago girl who’s pushed into a cruel prank by her sisters and ends up touching the body of a woman named Lillian Smith in a funeral home. Soon after, Margarita meets Leona, a woman who looks exactly like Lillian, and what could have been a ghost story becomes something deeper and more human: a long friendship between a curious girl and an older woman carrying a lifetime of hidden pain.
At the center of the book is storytelling itself. Leona doesn’t simply tell Margarita what happened to her and Lillian; she gives her pieces of a life shaped by trauma, survival, music, faith, betrayal, and sisterhood. Her voice can feel poetic, sharp, funny, and haunted all at once. Early on, she tells Margarita, “Life at its beginning is just a dot,” and that idea fits the whole novel. The book keeps widening from that dot, moving through childhood, the South, Chicago, Memphis, marriage, motherhood, violence, forgiveness, and the hard work of deciding what to do with the past.
Margarita is a strong narrator because she’s observant without pretending to understand everything right away. She’s young when the story begins, so her reactions have humor and honesty, especially when she’s trying to make sense of adults, family tension, and Leona’s mysterious life. As she grows, the book grows with her. Her relationship with Leona becomes less like a service project and more like a chosen inheritance. Through Leona, Margarita receives stories, warnings, comfort, and eventually questions about her own life that can’t be answered neatly.
One of the most memorable parts of Twin Spirits is how it treats pain without flattening the characters into their wounds. Leona and Lillian’s history is painful, but Thomas gives them humor, style, stubbornness, beauty, music, and spirit. Even when the book enters dark territory, it keeps returning to the idea that people can carry terrible memories and still choose tenderness. That comes through clearly when Leona says, “We are not monsters, and we never will be.” It’s a powerful line because the novel is so interested in the difference between what happens to people and who they decide to become.
Twin Spirits is best read as a family saga with a mystery at its heart and a poetic rhythm running through it. It’s about Black women surviving what they were handed, protecting what they can, and passing down truth in the only way they know how. The book has a conversational warmth that makes its heavier revelations feel personal rather than distant. By the end, Margarita’s journey isn’t just about discovering the truth. It’s about deciding which truths deserve power over her life, which memories need to be honored, and which ones can finally be released.
Pages: 263 | ASIN : B0GY1WZ7N1
