Jane and Isabel Peabody are white conjoined twins who share an arm and a leg. Sold as small children to a circus "freak" show during what appears to be the 1920s, they form a family with the other performers. After a doctor performs a new operation to separate them as teenagers, Isabel awakens from the procedure to learn that Jane didn't survive the surgery. But, for Isabel, Jane is still there, like a phantom limb. And Jane is full of resentment that Isabel survived and she did not. With a crude prosthetic arm and leg, Isabel continues with the sideshow act, now billed as The Mechanical Girl. Haunted and lonely, she is tricked into talking about the fakery in the acts by an undercover journalist who publishes an exposé that gets her kicked out of the sideshow. Eventually finding love with a tattoo artist, Isabel and her phantom twin reconcile their conflict. Isabel and the others in the sideshow appear as fully developed, distinct characters. An excellent author's note offers more insight into freak shows, including the ableism and ethnocentrism inherent in these displays, and her own discomfort with the subject. A muted, sometimes moody, palette colors this cleanly illustrated graphic novel that depicts the phantom version of Jane as uncolored with black outlines. (Age 13 and older)

A young woman is haunted by the ghost of her conjoined twin, in Lisa Brown's The Phantom Twin, a sweetly spooky graphic novel set in a turn-of-the-century sideshow.

Isabel and Jane are the Extraordinary Peabody Sisters, conjoined twins in a traveling carnival freak show—until an ambitious surgeon tries to separate them and fails, causing Jane's death.

Isabel has lost an arm and a leg but gained a ghostly companion: Her dead twin is now her phantom limb. Haunted, altered, and alone for the first time, can Isabel build a new life that's truly her own?