Brilliant, beautiful, a bit unhinged, and infuriatingly egocentric, Cassandra arrives at her family's California ranch determined to sabotage her identical twin sister's wedding. By turns laugh-out-loud hilarious and heartbreakingly tragic, this extraordinary novel from the 1960s incisively explores the family dynamics at play during a whiskey-soaked wedding weekend fraught with emotional drama, shocking developments, and desperate attempts to keep up appearances. It's a profoundly insightful and somewhat disturbing coming-of-age narrative - Cassandra's main motivation, as Deborah Eisenberg puts it in the afterword, is the "paralyzing terror of reaching maturity" - couched in a frantic comedy of manners.(AG)