The Foursome by Christina Baker Kline is a fictionalized recounting of the life of Sarah Yates, one of the two sisters who married famous conjoined twins Cheng and Eng in mid-1880s North Carolina. What could convince a woman to marry a man with whom she could never be alone, signing up for a lifetime of sharing her husband not only with his brother, but with her own sister? Kline does a great job of getting into Sarah’s head and understanding how someone could not only accept these circumstances, but even grow comfortable with them and have 11 children with a man who is permanently attached to another. The story is told against the backdrop of the Civil War, nicely incorporating issues of freedom, autonomy, power and duty on both a personal and an ideological level. Some parts made me physically uncomfortable to read, a sign of Kline’s vivid and compassionate storytelling. This is the third historical fiction written by Kline that I have read, and I really appreciate her painstaking research and focus on people and situations that have not gotten a lot of attention.