Abby and Meg are nearly identical twins, with one major exception: Meg was born with a rare disease that renders her impervious to physical pain. As a child, this "ability" soon makes her contemptuous of the whimperings of children with their skinned knees and busted lips--despite medical warnings that the disease could eventually cost her life if she weren't careful to pay attention to bleeding and physical aches. The disdain over her physical imperviousness grows into a pre-teen haughtiness over her psychic superwoman self until the family is economically forced by her father's cancer to submit Meg to paying medical research. Suddenly, Meg is one of many abnormals, and like solitary high school geniuses thrown into a select university setting of hundreds of solitary geniuses, the plot thickens. In her subtly blaring novel, Heuler has touched on sibling jealousy, animal abuse, medical research abuse, the boundaries of romantic love, the loss of a parent, the loss of economic status--and the general confusion of growing into and beyond maturity. The absorbing maze scene in the research hospital, with its rows of specimens and abnormals. Offers an amazing microscosm of all this in itself. This is Karen's first novel. She has published a short story collection, The Other Door, with the University of Arkansas Press.